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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."
First it comes out that multiplayer will be de-emphasized in D3. Then it's basically said that in order to display it properly you need to shell out $300 on a video card. I'll be more interested in Unreal 2. At least they actually care about what the PC gamer wants.
What Carmack actually said is,
"The GeForce 4 Ti is the best card you can buy."
So I'm wondering if we aren't being spammed by ATI marketing here.
--Blair
Seriously.
I'm an "old timer", but still I'm not old enough to have been concious of when this phenomenon actually began; there was a fundamental change somewhere in the last 15 years where things shifted from games using existing hardware fully to where games became the reason themselves to create new, faster hardware devices.
Not that this is bad, nit by any means, but it does give one interesting meat to consider; no one will argue that games are what's driving things like new video card technologies -- when did the chicken outdo the egg?
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
As far as 3D-accelerators go, the point when people started buying hardware just for games can fairly accurately be pinpointed to the release of GlQuake - which was a free download after Quake shipped allowing hardware acceleration. For a few years after that games shipped with hardware and software rendering, but all the reviews for such games would say "this game looks wicked cool with hardware acceleration, but looks like dog vomit in software mode- only buy this spiffy new game if you have a 3D card". Slowly then games went from software render only, to both software and hardware rendering, to where we are today that all games require hardware acceleration. This trend has repeated itself for various features build into different generations of 3D accelerators.
In terms of consumer graphics boards, I think the first major game to catch everyone's attention was Quake II. Quake I now has GL Quake, etc. but originally geometry rasterization was done in software. It was at E3 that Carmack and company demoed Quake II and what a 3D engine could achieve using hardware acceleration ... and caused Mr. Romero to flip out and tell his whole dev team working on Daikatana that they needed to switch over from the Quake I code base to the Quake II engine and leading to another year of delay ... but I digress.
Eric
"...no one will argue that games are what's driving things like new video card technologies -- when did the chicken outdo the egg? "
;)
It probably happened when people spent $3,000 on the latest computer hardware and demanded immediate return on their investment. At l;east that was my experience. My dad got me a 486-33 mhz machine back when they were seriously top of the line. That computer was like my supercomputer for many, many months. My dad dropped a pretty hefty chunk of change on it. He and I both felt that for all the money spent on it, it'd better be a day to night difference over the old 286 I had.
Fortunately, I had Wing Commander II. And boy was it superior on the 486! The game took advantage of the extra RAM to draw more stuff on the screen (like the pilot's hand controlling the ship), and it had the voice pack so your wingman could talk! And the game was smooooooooooooooth.
I think that game did more to impress my dad with his investment than the 3D stuff I ended up doing later on it. Any queeziness he had about buying me that machine melted that night.
I can tell you something, it's satisfying to buy new hardware and have it blow your old hardware away. That's why games like Halo are so important to the XBOX. Quake 3 was the game to do that on PC, but it looks like Doom 3 will easily take its place.
In any case, I think that explains the shift. To tell you the truth, if I didn't run Lightwave so much, I probably wouldn't have much idea how much faster one computer is over another. Guess I should play games s'more.
"Derp de derp."
have you read ANY of the reviews on doom3. The only reason doom3 is called doom3 and not another name is because it exists in the same world. The gameplay itself is totally different, they are trying to get it be like a horror movie. Read reviews, be less ignorant.
Wait a second. the mods you listed are multi only, there is no plot (beyond the individual map), quake3 is an awesome game as long as you don't want anything else besides dm and tdm.
p.s. as for the HL cheat thing, i heard somewhere that the newest version of ogc will fade in music from winamp whenever someone dies in cs (and fade out on rebirth).
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
Carmack mentioned that the new ATI hardware can do 7 (or is it 8?) texture grabs in one cycle. I know that ArtX built this feature into the flipper chip for the gamecube. The idea is to grab 8 textures in one cycle, while being able to perform various operations (fog, custom shading, lighting etc) on each those textures. The developers of Rogue Squad II (Factor5) have already admitted that they are using this feature for their targeting computer and texturing effects. There might be a migration of ArtX designed hardware into the mainstream ATI graphics cards. If this is true, then it should not be too hard to get Doom3 on the gamecube. Don't discount the cube cause it seems wimpy. It's got some hot stuff under the hood!
I know 10 years ago I bought a faster pc so that I COULD play games. Games have allmost always been more 'intense' for the hardware than simple desktop applications.
WordPerfect etc still ran great on my 8086 but if you wanted to play for example doom, you needed a faster machine(a 486 in my case).
Now look at it from the other side: would their ever be so much money invested in the development of faster hardware if there where no games? You don't really need a fast CPU to type a letter or make some spreadsheets.
Have you seen Morrowind?
That game looks 2x better on PC than on Xbox. PCs have ALREADY eclipsed the power of the current consoles, at least at the high end part of the market..
Also, there are plenty of games coming that look better than anything I've seen on consoles(Doom III, SWG, and Unreal 2 being three of them).
Shit adds up at the bottom...
I had the pleasure of seeing Alan Cox speak in Dublin a couple of months back, and he made the point that it was unreasonable for people to expect Nvidia to release the full source for their drivers. The Nvidia drivers were what gave them the edge. He reckoned that the ATI cards were generally a bit faster if you looked purely at the hardware, but Nvidia have had the advantage of working on the same codebase for their drivers for years now.
Ahem, tv is capable of 724X485. that is the NTSC standard... PAL and the other standards are very similar just different aspects and framerates
If you watched TV that was at 400X500 you'd be pretty upset with the picture quality.
My el-cheapo 19 inch tv does the testpattern that shows it has the capability to seperate pixels at the 724x485 resolution... if your tv cant, then your tv is really crappy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And if you bother to go find follow-up comments to that statement, you'll discover Carmack saying that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
You're testing the next generation card vs. the current generation. May as well compare a GF4 Ti4600 to a Radeon 7500 and see which one does better.
The NV30 hasn't been taped yet. There's no silicon to test. So while you can't say whether or not the NV30 will be better than the R300, it's still a faulty comparison for NV25 vs R300. And since the NV30 is supposed to be released in August/September (color me doubtful, since they don't have prelim silicon yet), there's not going to be much of a gap between their releases either.
Frankly, even if NV30 doesn't have the edge on R300 on paper I'll buy it in a second over ATI. Why? Because ATI's drivers suck, their support sucks, and anyone who's been burned by ATI over the past 20 years will know what I'm talking about. They have long had a tendancy to release poor to middling drivers and then rapidly desupport the card. Nvidia, on the other hand, is still supporting the original TNT with current drivers - the card they made 4 years or so ago. Plus, as Carmack observes, Nvidia's drivers make their cards surpass ATI - which any benchmark will show you.
Now if only Nvidia would put some decent output stages on the reference design... output quality at high resolutions is one area where ATI has long been better. And Matrox trounces them both.
A few years ago, my parents bought a mac, a Performa 5260 (one of the most un-upgradable and unsupported machines on the planet, which I knew at the time), and I kept saying, don't get a Performa, don't get a Performa. Well, they got the Performa (and later got quite angry when I told them that I'd told them not to get it).
My stepfather asked me, one day, after he'd had his computer for a while, how you compare one computer to another, in terms of speed. My simple reply was 'games'. See how a game plays on both systems. He didn't believe me that games are used for benchmark numbers, if not entire benchmarks. 'Why would anyone buy a better computer just for games?' he asked.
Our Performa came with a ton of useless crap on CD, but it also came with a copy of FA/18 Hornet 2.0, a flight sim. Stepfather is very into planes, so he started playing it one day. Over the next few months, he was more and more into the game.
When Hornet 3.0 came out, he purchased it. Same with A-10 Cuba, and the Hornet Korea upgrade. He even bought a game he couldn't play (Falcon 4.0), just for when he later could play it (i.e. got a new machine). He was also very disappointed when I told him he couldn't add a 3D accelerator to the Perorma, to get the beautifully textured goodness of Hornet 3.0. I think it was at this point I told him I'd told him, and he shouted that I had not.
We run a home-based business, or rather, they do, and I used to help. They needed a new computer, and the local Mac shop had a great deal on a G4, 17" monitor, laser printer, and so on, so they leased it (the whole purchase = tax deductable as a lease). GeForce 2MX (great at the time) and a sweet sweet 533 G4 processor.
Wouldn't you know it, Falcon 4.0's hardware acceleration only supports RAVE, and ATI cards directly, neither of which is supported on the GeForce 2, and no OpenGL support. What's the first thing he thinks of? Buy an ATI card for it, spend a few hundred bucks that they really don't have, and upgrade, just so that one game plays nicer than it did before (it plays very smooth in software mode).
I agree with the other posters, and my anecdote supports the claim. 3D is what drives sales. I remember WC3's 3D gameplay (basically software 3D done beautifully) on my friend's 486, and it was amazing. Let me tell you, if you didn't have the hardware to play it, you damn well wanted to buy the hardware to play it. That was the major turning point (for me). En masse, QGL sounds about right. DirectX was another important turning point, too. By making games faster (in Windows), people could write more complex games with better graphics, and they didn't have to bother with a DOS version. Then, people who didn't have Windows 95 had to get it, and people who didn't have the hardware for Windows 95, or barely had it, had to get that. If you wanted to game, you HAD to have W95, or you were stuck playing legacy games until eternity (which, for a hardcore gamer, is not an option).
So DX, OpenGL, GLide (which sucked), and use of these technologies are, to me, what really turned the tables. Game development took off, and so did hardware purchases. Now, everyone's chasing their first 3D high.
I'm just waiting for a holodeck.
--Dan
why shouldn't there be a high end pc games market? Porsche doesn't have to use geo metro engines so that geo metro owners don't feel left out.
:)
Interesting thought. Why aren't there any truly high-end supercards out there? I'm talking custom built 8x AGP Pro + 2 PCI slot cards with 3 DVI outputs that perform game functions like a Wildcat 5110 does Maya...
Probably wouldn't sell many of them at $2-5000 a pop, but they'd be there for geek bragging rights at least. Plus I could pick one up on Ebay a year or so after it comes out for a pittance
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Well said, John. I'm one of those that keeps track of your posts, and you do a good job of saying what's on your mind, but being clear about it. Having owned both cards myself, I use them both for what they're best at. 8500 for desktop graphics, and GF4 for gaming.
.:bleargh:.