Carmack on Doom 3 Video Cards

mr_sheel writes "According to a Gamespy interview with John Carmack, Carmack says what he thinks about the video cards with Doom3: ATI Radeon 8500 is a better card, with a nicer fragment path, while NVidia still consistently runs faster due to better drivers. And of course, the GeForce SDR cards will not be "fast enough to play the game properly unless you run at 320x240 or so." And in a ShackNews interview with Carmack, he says that Doom 3 at E3 was only running at medium quality... wow."

Comments

All I want for Doom III

[bogie]

Cool cutting edge graphics are great, but really its still the gameplay that matters. It seems like all the gaming sites/rags/etc only get off on talking about pixel shaders, and game engines, when all the gamer wants is something original and fun to play. I just pray it can measure up to games like Half-life, No One Lives Forever, and Dues Ex. I want an ACTUAL STORYLINE, scripted events, and real NPC interaction. If its just Doom/Quake/Serious Sam style gameplay, with great graphics I won't be buying this time around.

Re:All I want for Doom III

[theRhinoceros]

I think the last 3 or so games, in addition to Carmack's personal policies as evidenced in his .plans and emails, have illustrated that Id's slant towards technology rather than storyline is here to stay. No big deal, so long the games based on Id engines are of sufficient quality (see JK2, Half-Life, etc.). This isn't necessarily a bad thing: id keeps pushing the tools and tech part, others will take their tech and make great games out of them. I have little doubt that the Doom III technology will result in an awesome single player game with fantastic storyline, NPC interaction and scripted events; I'm not sure that Doom III itself will be that game.

Re:Woah...

[moonbender]

Well, while Doom III certainly looks good, I don't think the whole "medium quality" issue is so big a deal. If it was, they'd have taken more of an effort and shown it at high quality, or at least they'd have told just about everyone that it'd look better at high quality.
In the "interview" with Shacknews (actually it's just one email), Carmack says that high quality settings opposed to medium ones would mean "uncompressed textures" and "anisotropic filtering". While especially anisotropic filtering is nice, it's not that big of a deal. The game would look better, but not stunningly so, and I'm not actually sure if you'd notice the higher quality in the low res movies that are available on the net.

The interview is quite interesting, though, even though it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know (Nvidia faster than Ati, Ati's drivers suck, GF4 Ti best buy). Please note that the story (for some reason) links to page two of the review, page one is available, too. :P

Doom III and video cards

[bertok]

I suspect that when Doom III is released, a lot of people are going to upgrade to the GeForce 5 just to be able to play the game. This has happened in the past. "New ID game? Time to upgrade..." is a line even I've repeated like a parrot myself over the past few years. However, as this cartoon points out, ID software is best at making engines, not games. Will upgrading be worth it for most people, or are they better off waiting a year or two until interesting games are released that utilize the Doom 3 engine?

Consider this: Of the three games I've played almost exclusively in recent years, all three were Half-Life mods: Counter-Strike, Day Of Defeat, and Team Fortress Classic. However, with my current GeForce 3 based video card, I get the maximum 100fps at the highest supported resolution of 1280x960. So what exactly is the point of upgrading? Even if I upgraded to be able to play Doom III, I'd play it for at most a month, then go back DoD/CS/TFC.

PS: While we're on the topic of Half-Life, does anyone know why the engine doesn't allow resolutions above 1280x960? It seems like an arbitrary limit that could be easily removed. Maybe some of the people that invest months of time into writing HL cheats should try to figure out how to remove that limit instead...

The eternal story for ATI

[Trepalium]

It's never been that their cards are junk, it's just that for every card, they start anew with completely untested drivers, which never quite mature before the card is discontinued, and new ones introduced. Nvidia's "unified" drivers, on the other hand, tend to be refinements from version to version and card to card, rather than completely different drivers.

If ATI could just finally fix their drivers once and for all, they'd be on even standing with Nvidia.

Re:The eternal story for ATI

[ergo98]

I would say that an analysis at nvidia and at ATI would also show a completely different corporate philosophy regarding driver development (I can't vouch for this, nor do I have any first hand knowledge : It's just a hunch). With nvidia hardware, the drivers (I'm normally a Windows guy, so we're talking Wintel here) install professionally, they work superbly, they continually support even ancient chipsets (TNT users are seeing performance improvements with each detonator release), and they are feature rich. With ATI, in every experience that I've had the installs have been horribly amateurish, the drivers have been GPFing nightmares, the documentation is horrible, and is usually accusatory of the customer (I recently came across one of these "All your problems are belong to you" sort of documents with a ATI TVWonder PCI). ATI also likes to orphan products, so even only slightly dated products often get relegated to the un-updated trash heap. I suspect, and again this is only a hunch, that ATI treats driver and application development as an nuisance, and only as something to be done when the product is on retail shelves and to entice customers (a very short term approach), whereas nvidia treats it as a scientific continual pursuit of perfection for all their customers.

If I sound down on ATI, I'm not really : They have proven themselves to have extraordinary hardware guys who make, literally, the best stuff in the business, however their ability to continually shoot themselves in the foot with a horrible software development record is hard to fathom : Talk to anyone about ATI, and 95% of the time they'll relate some driver nightmare they've had with an ATI card.

Re:When did games dictate the need for faster hrdw

[BusterB]

Wing commander was the first game to start the hardware upgrade craze over a game. I have the PC Computing magazine that discusses this; it probably drove the move to 386's more than windows 3!

Re:The Console winner will be?

[jacobito]

That's what folks always say when comparing PCs to consoles, and it's certainly not untrue. The beauty of any current console, though, is that in one year, I'll still be able to enjoy brand new games made for that console, with the knowledge that the games are running exactly as intended. This is unfortunately not always the case with a PC.

Your point is really lame.

[Wakko Warner]

If people want to drop $400 every couple of years in order to enjoy the newest high-end video games at the highest resolution and refresh rate possible, why should you care? To you, it may be a waste of money, but it isn't to them.

- A.P.

Re:The Console winner will be?

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

And that's actually why I like console controllers better--giving PC developers more freedom in controls just gives them an excuse to make their games more complicated. They don't understand the true art of games--to make them deep without making them complicated. The Console is where you find games that appreciate my time is valuable and not to be squandered without great reward.

Also, launch a super nintendo emulator on your pc, then try to tell me you wouldn't rather have a controller. Controllers are simply the best input device for certain games.