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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."
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.
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.
:)
:)
I play games on the PC. Am I a PC gamer? I like single-player games. I'm quite excited about Doom III's focus being on single-player. I am quite likely to buy it, and to spend whatever I need to be able to run it properly.
I remember the first two Dooms fondly because they were engrossing single-player games. Quake I was good as well, but Quake II, Arena and games like Unreal, etc. catered to the multi-player crowd. Fine, that's what some people want, but not me.
I think the main reason that I don't like multiplayer FPS games is that I suck. My friends (when we can co-ordinate something) kick my ass, and I get tired really quickly of having my ass fragged on the net by some 14 year-old who runs circles around me. I don't have my whole life to devote to improving my Quake skills. Therefore, I like to play single-player, where I can set my own handicap.
Moreover, there is a real repetitiveness to deathmatch-type games, IMHO. Give me something engrossing, like Half Life was.
As for the complaint about a $300 video card, well:
a/ games like this are graphics-dependent and I would rather have mind-blowing graphics and realism than have it suck because they want to be backwards-compatible with your Voodoo 1 card **
b/ you are going to use this $300 for more than Doom III, because
c/ by making such an advanced and neat-o engine (if it is all it is hyped to be), ID is improving the quality of ALL FPS games. First, they are raising the bar for their competitors and second, many will license their technology. Maybe even some people who will make a nice multi-player FPS for people like you.
Therefore, I think you should retract your silly comments and support what ID is doing for the good of gamers everywhere.
** Don't knock me for this, I play Nethack too, and I posted my YAFAP today, for those who would like to congratulate me.
"...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."