Slashdot Mirror
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."
Just get the mid end equipment, that or last generation high end equipment. Right now, the GF4 Ti4200 is a very good buy, at ~$200. It's still one of the most expensive parts inside the box, but very good bang for the buck.
If you want an even cheaper solution, go for a GF3 Ti200. It's still fast enough to play everything (including, I assume, Doom III), and goes for like ~$120.
Whatever you do, don't get a GF4 MX. They aren't actually that slow, but their architecure is on the level of the old GF2s.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You know what? What if people were obsessed with lobsters the way that these guys were with fill rates?
you know, bob down at the creek is like: "Hey, I caught this lobster, and it's scurrying abilities are really great, but the sloppy curvature of its claws really kills it for me..." and then slim replies, "Well, shit, I'm gonna overclock my lobster boat and catch so many lobsters they're gonna elect me King of Red Lobster! And it's got bump-mapping too!"
My point being: You can stay up too late and have your weird z-buffered, anti-aliased dreams, but you can't get back that $400 you just dropped on the latest Bligblagdoodlehopper of a card, and dontcha forget itBR>
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
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.
:P
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.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I wonder if any of the current laptops will be able to run Doom3... I'm considering buying a laptop with a GF4go as the Radeon7500 based ones seems to be slower... I wonder if its really worth it to go from 32 megs to 64 megs of ram?
He did not say that the Radeon 8500 was better than the Geforce4 at all. In fact, he said that the Geforce4 was better than current ATI offerings. However, he said that next-gen ATI offerings, which he used to demo at e3, were better than next-gen NVIDIA offerings currently (rumors are that it's just a scouped up gf4, something like a gf4 ultra).
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
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...
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.
Ok, first off, nobody makes more money than god. Churches are very profitable businesses.
Second off, sweet christ that was a terrible analogy, if only because maybe five guys in the world can relate.
Thirdly (and lastly, my beer isn't getting any cooler), 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.
Lastly (I lied about the last one), of course you can't get money back that you spend. This is one of the fundamental tenets of capitalism. I'm afraid you're just going to have to get used to it.
--
pants ahoy
If ATI could just finally fix their drivers once and for all, they'd be on even standing with Nvidia.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Right about the time companies realized gamers would buy new hardware to play a game. Sounds retarded, and yet it's true...
Sent from your iPad.
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!
c) and on a TV.
On a TV. I mean really. You want to take a game like that, meant to be seen at 1024x764 and put in on a screen that can squeeze out only 400x500 if you're lucky? Would you like me to kick you in the nuts while you're playing, too?
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Carmack on ATI:
"the driver quality is still quite a ways from Nvidia's"
My jaw almost hit the floor after reading that.......NOT!
ATI is moving to a unified driver model like Nvidia's so maybe, just maybe, we'll start to see better refined drivers as ATI's product line ages.
-ted
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.
Once upon a time, I turned to my friend and said, "When in God's name did graphics cards become more expensive than your CPU?"
Without missing a beat he replies, ".. Well, it's got more transistors..."
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
GF4 Ti4200 is just about the best bang for the buck you can get right now. Fast enough to run everything released now and during the next, say, 6 to 12 months at very high settings, but still affordable, not (way) more expensive than, say, CPU or mainboard like a GF4 Ti4600 would be.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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.
The two main TV formats are:
NTSC(North America) 720x480
PAL(Europe) 720x576
Anything else needs to be shot, burnt, scraped, or just plan thrown away.
What if people were obsessed with lobsters the way that these guys were with fill rates
People would get sick of lobster. In early colonial days (N. Amer.) lobsters were incredibly plentiful. They would be collected as fertilizer for farms, there was a law limiting how often you could make your indentured servant eat lobster.
Kinda sad, but probably the biggest seller of all, back in the day, for hardware acceleration was the game "Tomb Raider" by EIDOS. I recall it coming out with 3dfx acceleration, and people crapping themselves in amazement about it.
The step from GF3 to GF4 is not that important in that way, existing functions were enhanced and sped up, but there were no similarily ground breaking functions added. Seems to be quite a common thing for Nvidia cards, as the same was true for TNT and TNT2, the original GeForce and the GF2 (that was when hardware T&L was introduced, remember that hype?) and now with GF3 and GF4.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
There isn't any reason why any of the current consoles won't be able to play Doom III, though the odds are best for the Gamecube and XBox, and probably more likely the XBox.
Nevermind the fact that the console versions would be running at a lower resolution and thus require much less video capabilities to render the scenes, but the fact that the game will be coded closer to the metal will take off a huge percentage of the required system specs.
I personally would be very amazed if Doom III didn't at least make it to the XBox. Kid yourself all you want, but by about this time TWO YEARS FROM NOW, PCs will JUST be catching up to the XBox. This is of course based purely on the assumption that Xbox/Gamecube developers don't continue to outdo themselves well on into that time frame and show us stuff we assumed the machines simply wouldn't do.
Simple Case and Point. Quake III on the Dreamcast outperforms Quake III on a Pentium II 400 with an 8 megabyte video card and 24 megs of system memory. In fact, I'm not sure Quake III would play on a PC with those specs at all, yet it kicks much ass on a Dreamcast.
Expect to be blown away.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
They've hired a real science fiction author to write the story for the game. It's the same guy who did the 7th Guest story, if you remember that old (but excellent) game. I don't remember the guys name off the top of my head though...
And top of the line - GeForce 4ti - is about $300
Today's prices are meaningless. By the time this game arrives GF4 Ti's and Radeon 85xx's will medium to low end cards and reasonably priced.
on another note, is it just me or is Id and john carmack dangerously close to becoming the george lucas of the game industry? I find myself incapable of getting excited about DOOM 3.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I agree with you absolutely. Origin was definitely pushing hardware to the limits with its games of the early 90s, annoyingly so if you ask me. Whereas Wing Commander ran comfortably on my 386-33, just a couple years later I'd end up needing a 486-66 to play Strike Commander, Privateer, and System Shock. A couple years after that, Ultima Online was about to be released, and my PC was again useless.
The constant need to upgrade to enjoy the latest games just seems like a fact of geek life now. Thank you for reminding me of whom to blame for all this.
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.
1) Source, please. Not saying you're lying, but I don't really trust the words of an AC out of principle.
2) Besides, as long as it renders it at consistently higher than 30 fps, I'm fine.
3) Is UT2003 one of those "newest Unreal-engine based games"? UT 2003 is slated for a Q3/02 release. Claiming that a Q3/02 game won't run on Q2/02 high-end graphics cards is nothing short of ridiculous.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Because by the time a Mac version of the game is released, those expensive video cards will have been low-end for at least a couple years.
...
[Me 3 years from now]: Hey, I just got this cool new game, Doom III !
[Everybody else]:
[Everybody else] (to each other, turning away): C'mon, let's go play Tribes 4.
c-hack.com |
Heh, well to an extent I agree with you. I find game consoles in general to be a better value than new video cards. However, the pivotal point of this argument is that I also prefer console games to PC games in most cases.
A user who prefers PC games would think you're a loon for suggesting that. Remember, games are what you play, not graphics.
"Derp de derp."
"...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."
This almost isn't worth responding to.
.plan file said doom3 would come to xbox
If Doom3 comes to any console, its xbox.
a) originally a
b) no other console is powerful enough to do it, if a gf3 is going to be a "moderately performing" card when the game comes out.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
If you're using Mandrake 8.2 with the default kernel, Haesslich's script at my site http://tuxbox.by-a.com/mdk_rpms will handle everything for you. Couldn't be easier really, and I'm surprised Nvidia doesn't offer something like this. Everyone that's tried it loves it.
I'm not sure it was glQuake that did it. I remember Quake looking OK in software mode.
What I remember of that time is that the game that made me buy a 3DFX card even before the game came out was the (now) much laughed at Tomb Raider. That was the first game I remember ever *needing* a a 3D card for as it just looked amazing.
Even if you don't like Tomb Raider now, remember that at the time Tomb Raider was amazing and offered a kind of cinematic experience really not seen before in games - an experience that was great increased with the 3D card (like the waterfall, or the T-Rex).
I recall a couple of other friends saying that they bought their first 3D card for that game. I think you'd be surprised at how many people did so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Games with big, nicely rendered breasts ALWAYS do well, reguardless of any actual quality.
You want Doom III to have the same forced-upgrade appeal as the last two? Just put some big, nicely rendered breasts in it somewhere. Maybe on those fat grey guys from the screenshots.....
Robort knows all.
I get tired really quickly of having my ass fragged on the net by some 14 year-old who runs circles around me.
Not to mention that when you do manage to kill someone, they start whining "cheater, wallhack, <weapon>whore!!"
Here's the relevant bit:
Doom III is very much hardware driven, and one of the controversies of this year's E3 was that the game was demonstrated on the latest ATI graphics card rather than a card from NVidia. "NVidia has been stellar in terms of driver quality and support and doing all of the things right," says Carmack, who has been an outspoken evangelist for NVidia's GeForce technology. "For the past few years, they have been able to consistently outplay ATI on every front. The problem is that they are about one-half step out of synch with the hardware generation because they did Xbox instead of focusing everything on their next board. So they are a little bit behind ATI."
The vast majority of console games suck compared to even mediocre PC games. Console controllers can't even compare to the ease, flexibility, and precision of a keyboard/mouse combo or a PC joystick. Split-screne sucks for multiplayer. Even with a hard drive and networking capability, the X-Box still won't have nearly the kind of game communities that Quake or Half-Life have. Hell, it won't even compare to the much smaller game communities that have sprung up around lesser-selling games. Console games are merely somewhat entertaining distractions. The PC is where you'll find the real games.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
Kinda funny, I'll be buying a Geforce4 (Geforce5?) when DoomIII comes out.
> 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.
But I noticed that the shadown had some annoying stair-step effect!
I wonder if anistropic filtering would have corrected this (it depends how it's applied of course)..
Anyway, I was trying to analyse the way it looks, I suspect that when you're playing the game, you're much less sensitive to such details.
You're kidding, right?! Every serious game-company does this for the exact reasons mentioned by Carmack.
They have to be concerned with fill-rates. They have the crappy job to make sure that their game runs as good as possible on all plausible setups. Only one way to find out...
I think someone here is a little envious of the success (and money) of one Mr. Carmack. And come on.. The lobster analogy..? That seriously makes NO sense to anyone.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
lucas does the same thing. all you just described was a tech demo and a horribly void sex life. people who care can get pixel shaded bump mapping from...well...anything with pixelshaded bump mapping. and last time i was in the weird world of "outside" i saw a lot of stuff casting shadows.
the question is, will id include all of that crap with a game worth playing, or is "the guy from doom" gonna end up wandering around casting a shadow and telling nataly portman "i dont like the sand, its rough and irritating" in dolby digital 5.1 just like another recent heavily hyped tech demo with a few good action scenes.
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.
Do you have a mouse on your precious console ?
fuck that innovation stuff. lets just keep the same old tired 3 year old shit for games. change is scary.
I don't find any Ti4200, but Ti4400s are about 350 Euros here in Italy
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...
When building a system to play modern 3d games, I've started thinking about the video CPU as the "main processor", and the Athlon or Intel CPU on the motherboard as the "coprocessor". This way, I can sort of trick myself into being comfortable spending $300+ on the "main processor" and a mere $150 on the "coprocessor".
If you're not in it for the games, that philosophy doesn't really apply. Since I have want to play the latest games right away, I need to have MS Windows on that system. The OS condemns the machine to being a toy, so my philosophy above pretty much makes sense. ;)
So some hotshot Ferrari-drivin' game developer who makes more money than God likes to buy video cards every week to compare 'em?
:-P
I hightl doubt Mr Carmack has to buy graphics cards, I would assume that as an ISV iD get whatever they want essentially for free, since they drive hardware sales in their niche of the industry to such a degree. Hardware manufacturers would be only to eager to do anything in return for him recommending their products to his millions and millions of fans. But I suspect that as a purist, he's only swayed by superior technology and not by perks!
You can stay up too late and have your weird z-buffered, anti-aliased dreams, but you can't get back that $400 you just dropped on the latest Bligblagdoodlehopper of a card
Sure you can. Sell it on eBay, or think of the money you aren't wasting at bars when you're at home playing
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.
I've often said that if it wasn't for games, we'd probably all still be using 486's for our day-to-day desktop office machines. I've always thought that it's been the games market that's driven the technology advances, particularly in sound and video. Of course, there are lots of other applications that require fast hardware, (site servers, video and stills graphic design, university research etc) but for the average joe home user, it's been games which have led to them having a 1ghz+ machine on their desktop for writing docs and surfing the web.
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
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?
When games started taking a long time to make. Used to be even a revolutionary game could be made from start to finish in months. Wolfenstein 3-D took about 6 months to make. The original Doom took about a year. iD has been working on Doom3 for about two years and they've still probably got at least a year to go.
When Carmack decided the technical parameters of the Doom3 engine back in 2000, he would have been an idiot if he designed it to only take advantage of the features of existing hardware. Instead he designed it to use features and require performance which he knew would be entering the mainstream by the time the game was released.
Of course, Carmack is unique in that he can actually influence Nvidia, ATi, etc. a bit into supporting the features he wants. On the other hand, you have to realize that back in 2000 Carmack, Nvidia, ATi, etc. already had a very good idea what sort of features would be supported in the 3D cards of 2003. Of course there is some guessing and tweaking involved (which Carmack seems to be particularly good at), but a good 3D engine designer has to design for the hardware of the time when the game will be released, not the hardware of the time when he's designing.
As for why games take so much longer these days, that's another story but the basic point is that they are not only more complex technically but that there is ever increasing detail in the art, scripting, level design, etc. that it takes much larger teams with much better tools much longer to make a game than in the old days.
Doom took a year? If I remember correctly, Doom was about a year late when it came out...am I wrong?
Tim
how often do you buy a new gfx card, maybe 1 every 2 years.
I just paid 300 pounds gb for my gf4 ti4600
150 per year
2.88 per week
but after the 2 years I dont throw them away. I could sell it for maybe 50 quid. Actually they just shuffle down the computers. My best goes into the spare PC, the spare PC's might get donated to a friend.
I can live with that.
roll on GF5
:)
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
The enw unreal engine allows rocket paths to disturb steam that comes up from vents as they pass through it.
so what? I dont even notice that shit in real life, let alone video games.
You get rockets shot at you in real life?
Where do you work??
He couldn't find any damn quantum processors on pricewatch, or else he would have taken some higher quality shots.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I recently bought a Gainward 'Golden Sample' 4200 ti (128 mb version). It was a bit more than most 4200 boards (~$230), but Gainward's Golden Sample cards include a utility for overclocking beyond normal ranges, while still remaining under warranty. My PIII 1 ghz machine is a bit underpowered for it, but the water in Morrowind sure is pretty.
What if the Hokey-Pokey really is what it's all about?
I bought a GF2 MX, 64mb DDR... It's nice enough, I can play Q3A smoothly at 640x480 with 2x AA and high quality and what not.
I didn't buy a faster card because I was waiting for a reason I needed a faster card, and because it was fifty bucks. Spending $400 so that I could run 1280x1024 with AA just wasn't worth it for me. But when Doom 3 comes out, and my card doesn't cut it anymore, you're damn strait I'll upgrade.
Synergy is your friend
Er, I suspect you're looking at a Ti4600. The SRP on the Ti4200 is $199 (USD), which I believe is the same in Europe.
Frankly, if you're going to buy a GF4, the best buy is the Ti4400. You can find them for about $230 - only $10-20 more than a 128 MB Ti4200 and considerably faster.
I definitely agree with the previous post though - the absolute best bang for the buck right now is the GF3 Ti200. These cards were twice the price 2 months ago and are only 6 months old. The GF4 is not a good buy ATM -- the NV30 is coming out in 2-4 months and should absolutely blow the old stuff out of the water (as will the R300, the Perhilion, and 3DLabs's card). Both the ATI R300 and the NV30 should be fully DX9 compatible too (which Perhelion and 3DLabs are not).
I'm in kind of a tight spot... I'm seriously looking at buying a new computer, but don't know what graphics card to get, if any. Unfortunately my old card is a 32MB GF2, which is rather constricting at this point (if only because of the memory). I'll probably go GF3 Ti200, since I think Doom3 will be the next big thing that would want more, and it's over a year away.
Unreal Tournament II is coming out in a month and will not run well at all on a GF2 MX... unless you go super low res and turn off most of the eye candy.
Of course, it is UT2, so most people will turn off the eye candy just because it's annoying.
Wrong!
What Carmack actually says is this:
With regards to 8500 vs. GF4, he meant that the 8500 has better hardware on paper, but GF4's efficient hardware implementation makes it faster. He mentioned driver quality as a separate issue from speed.
In talking about ATI's next generation hardware, the R300, he says the following in separate emails. From www.rage3d.com.
However, he was comparing R300 to a GF4, not NV30. In this email to nvnews:
Simple Case and Point. Quake III on the Dreamcast outperforms Quake III on a Pentium II 400 with an 8 megabyte video card and 24 megs of system memory. In fact, I'm not sure Quake III would play on a PC with those specs at all, yet it kicks much ass on a Dreamcast.
It's reasonably playable on a PC like that with a TNT2. I think it looks like crap on both systems though. ;)
Back when I had an G2 MX SuSE automatically used the open source nv drivers right from the start.
I had no serious problems when I upgraded to a Radeon either and am currently enjoying the dual monitor support.
Try installing the latest version of X.
You might also point out that when you steal a video card from Best Buy, they no longer have it to sell. When you steal software, the software company still has it.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
All right, people. You're technically correct about the NTSC specifications, but with TV, it's not the same as it is with your VGA cards. On your computer you can see the full 1024x768 or whatever, but your TV gets chopped off at the edges, quite significantly, it's interlaced and there are intentional, inherent degradations in an NTSC signal because of bandwidth limitations. I think the original poster was being generous when he allowed for 400x500.
Metal Gear Solid did this long ago, not to mention, Metal Gear Solid 2 which is much improved.
- sigs are for wimps.
Also, resolution isn't the limited factor of image quality of video games on TVs. Until id Software's next video game looks as good on my TV as a Saving Private Ryan DVD, resolution doesn't matter.
Right now resolution is just the easy way to cheat to try to get better graphics. Quake 3 at 1280x1024 on my PC still doesn't look anywhere near as good as Starship Troopers does on my TV.
mbbac
You can't show me a single Pentium III 733 with only 64 megabytes of ram that will do ANYTHING close to what the XBox is doing,
If we stripped the OS down to the bare minimum like was done with the Xbox OS then we would. But then again we'd finally be comparing apples to apples at that point, and we all know it's more fun to argue pointlessly about apples to oranges comparisons.
and most games coming out will still run on a Pentium II 400, so whatever super-beefed k-rad system you've got probably isn't getting pushed very hard since most games just aren't taking advantage of it,
While it's true that most games currently being released will run on a PII-400, most of them won't run that well. I mean, you can turn down the resolution to 640x480 and turn down the detail levels and turn off all the visual effects and it will, in fact, run on the low-end hardware. But what's the point? If you've got a 1.6 GHz processor, a GF2 or GF3 video card and a half gig of RAM, why not crank it up to the max and see the game in it's full glory, the way it was intended to be played? 1024x768 anti-aliased with full visual effects sure looks a hell of a lot better than anything on a TV screen. And the gameplay is the same.
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.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Don't use Morrowind as a benchmark test for any video card. It doesn't matter if you have a PII400 with a TNT2 or a AMD 1900+ with a GeForce 4 Ti4600, you get about the same framerate.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
In the article(s), it is said that they are stressing single player play for Doom III. I think this is great, because (as some1 else said), I don't have time to sit around all day honing my skills @ deathmatch so that I can get my ass kicked online.
However, am I the only one that feels that there has been a huge loss since most of the games since the original doom series haven't had multi-player cooperative mode? I remember sitting on a couple computers for hours playing cooperative doom w/my brother back in the day, and it was great fun.
I'm really dissappointed that cooperative mode seems to have disappeared... If it's fun for a single player, it's also fun for multiple people to work together.
Am I the only one that feels this way? It seem that game designers aren't creating as many games that allow people to work together. Sure, it's fun to blow up your buddies every now and then in a deathmatch, but I find that cooperative can be much more enjoyable, as you work thru the game's problems together. It turns the single player experience into a group thing, instead of one person being holed up in a room w/the computer all day...
Place sig here.
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.
Quake II wasn't bad for single player, but it definitely had more of a multiplayer focus. We used to play it at work on occasion and I had fun because I regularly fragged the non-game players that I worked with. Then I played it online, got the floor wiped with my carcass, and quit.
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.
Agreed. While I think that the multi-player games with classes and different skills are neat (Counterstrike, RTCW, Medal of Honor), I'm no good at them. If I'm going to get into a game where the object is to simply kill stuff and blow stuff up, I want to be able to do so without having to worry about learning all the different skills and techniques and so on for the mechanic, medic, sniper, rocketman, etc. I just wanna sit down and frag for 20 minutes and then go read a book. I don't have the time to devote to learning the intricacies of "ultra-cool new multiplayer game" because I have a job and a life to deal with. I'm sure I'd think differently if I were a teenager.
IMHO, we need more games that focus on the single-player experience. I just bought Jedi Knight II this past Friday. It was great fun, I had a blast. I also had beaten it by Monday monring. So much for the $50 it cost me. I tried playing a little bit of multiplayer Jedi Knight but it was not enjoyable. You couldn't have a single character that had all of the skills and weapons available like in the single-player game. You had to customize your character so that you only had a subset of the single-player abilities. So after spending a weekend learning how to play JK2, I had to relearn a completely new playstyle just to even think about being competitive online. I remember in the old days when games had 50-100 levels and it took weeks of playing to beat them. Nowdays games are considered deep if they have 25 levels and last you a weekend. Modern game companies spend so much time working on making sure that the latest game has all the cool multiplayer functions of the last big hit that nobody really works at producing good, single-player games.
Honestly, what is so much fun about running in circles and shooting each other just so that you can trash-talk them afterwards? Can you really play a multiplayer fragfest for 3 hours and say that you enjoyed it? I just can't see what is so engrossing about this playstyle. Especially since every game out there (Unreal Tournament, Q3A, RTCW, CS, etc) has exactly the same multiplayer features (classes, game types, weapon types). The only thing that's any different are the images onscreen.
Doom took a year? If I remember correctly, Doom was about a year late when it came out...am I wrong?
I believe so. The original design document (pdf) for Doom is dated 11/28/92. The release date was 12/10/93.
Obviously work was started before the design document was finished, but as you can tell by perusing it, the game was still being sketched out at the end of November, 1992. Several reports say that iD began Doom only after the Wolf 3D expansion Spear of Destiny was released, which was September, 1992. So, if we take that as the start date, it looks like about 15 months.
As for an iD game being a year late, I'm not sure, but you may be thinking of Quake 1?
I don't agree with your point, but I just gotta say, your lobster analogy rocks. LOBSTER BOATS ARE ALWAYS FUNNY!
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.
> there was a law limiting how often you could make your indentured servant eat lobster.
I've heard the same story about salmon and oysters, and workhouses. (Oysters certainly were a cheap plentiful food in some places in the past).
rant
You missed my point. I'm saying I've started thinking that the video card IS the "main processor", and is where you spend the most money. Your recommended system is pretty much the one I just built myself.
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
That's probably why Xbox live is supposed to have fancy voice technologies.
Also, launch a super nintendo emulator on your pc, then try to tell me you wouldn't rather have a controller.
Sure. That's why I have a gamepad for my PC for those games that work best with it. Now, when you have a Cyborg3D Gold joystick (or better), a real keyboard, a microphone, and a nice optical mouse for your console, you let me know.
They don't understand the true art of games--to make them deep without making them complicated.
That depends almost completely on the type of game. If you tried to simplify a flight sim down to the console level, you'd piss off a lot of people. There are other similar games that require a certain level of complexity. You don't see airline pilots flying the plane with a gamepad, and gamers don't want that either. I would rather type certain commands or memorize some hotkeys rather than use the cumbersome interfaces that console developers come up with to deal with complexity and compensate for the dearth of buttons available on the controllers. PC games can have nice interfaces too. And those interfaces can be easier to use since you often have multiple options such as hotkeys, mouseclicks, or other methods of accessing whatever command you're trying to give. That flexibility allows me to play in whatever way is most comfortable for me. Consoles just don't offer nearly the level of control that a PC does.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The name "Golden Sample" always makes me think of peeing in a cup. Those wacky Taiwanese marketing people!
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Unfortunately, the games that work best with it are all on the Console. I've considered getting a game pad for my PC--but only to play emulated games from earlier consoles. You don't see too many fighting games or platform games on PCs.
I would rather type certain commands or memorize some hotkeys rather than use the cumbersome interfaces that console developers come up with to deal with complexity and compensate for the dearth of buttons available on the controllers.
I only find that to be a problem on games designed on PCs and brought to consoles, mostly first person shooters. Games designed for consoles tend to be simple enough to use with the console interface, and usually have nearly as much depth.
That flexibility allows me to play in whatever way is most comfortable for me.
Almost, but not quite. It lets you pick from a mouse or joystick, but it doesn't let you stop developers from throwing in 100 worthless weapons and magic spells into your game just so they can write "we've got 100 weapons!!!! This game is bigger than ever!!!" on the back of the box. You can't stop developers from fetishizing complication as a twisted virtue.
You speak of flexibility, but purchasing a console is my way of exercising flexibility over game developers--by buying into a market that encorages simplicity, I've communicated my anticomplexity preferences to anyone interested in selling to me.
If the Geforce SDR isn't fast enough to run Doom III, why the hell did he tell us it would?
He also said that the savage4 would work with some details turned down, so I'm damn glad I have a Geforce 4!
Damn you and your lying ways, John Carmack! First telling me Doom(1) will run on a 386, now *this*!
It's been a long time.
This batch of comments from me have let people draw conclusions that leave me scratching me head wondering how they managed to get from what I said to what they heard.
Other people have outlined the issues in detail in comments already, but the crux is that, even with driver quality removed from the discussion (not counting conformance issues, running at fill limited resolutions), GF4 hardware is still faster than 8500 hardware on basically everything I tested. The 8500 SHOULD have been faster on paper, but isn't in real life.
The hardware we used at E3 was not an 8500, and while the drivers were still a bit raw, the performance was very good indeed.
Take with a grain of salt any comment from me that has been paraphrased, but if it is an actual in-context quote from email, I try very hard to be precise in my statements. Read carefully.
John Carmack
For example, a GeForce 4 would cost me $399 whereas a GameCube only costs $249.
"A" GeForce 4 doesn't cost $399. The fastest cards available might cost that much, but the models that most people buy retail for about $200. You're spreading FUD.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I guess that's the real issue. I prefer the depth and complexity of PC games to console games, which I usually find to be too simplistic for my taste. Sure, there are some console games that I really like. I prefer to play sports games, platform games, and certain other specific titles on a console. I prefer to play most RPGs, RTS or turn-based strategy and tactical games, Adventure games, simulators, and shooters on the PC.
but it doesn't let you stop developers from throwing in 100 worthless weapons and magic spells into your game just so they can write "we've got 100 weapons!!!!
Well, that just sounds like a crappy game, and I wouldn't want to play it whether it was a console title or a PC title. Both have more than their fair share of lame games.
I'm looking forward to Unreal Tournament 2003 right now. I still play the original to this day. If this one has gameplay even on par with UT, it will be wonderful.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
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 $2-5000 a pop, but they'd be there for geek bragging rights at least. Plus I could pick one up on Ebay a year or so after it comes out for a pittance
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
But if you were a fan of the Mechwarrior universe as portrayed in the books and role-playing game, then there is no comparison between the two games. Mechs are supposed to be big and complicated to pilot. Mechwarrior is closer to a simulator than a shooter/fighter game like AC. It had nothing to do with interface design problems. Mechwarrior was supposed to be like that.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Yes, of course you should have mentioned you were talking about Canadian Dollars. On an international forum that's self-confessedly US centric, "$" refers to the US-Dollar, and not the various other forms.
Anyway, you're still spreading FUD. You said, I quote, "For example, a GeForce 4 would cost me $399 whereas a GameCube only costs $249." The currency is not that important really, the fact remains that, according to you, "a" GF4 costs nearly twice as much as a Nintendo GameCube is BS. The list price for the GC is 250 USD, the list price for a GF4 Ti4200 is 200 USD, list prices for (crappy) GF4 MX cards are way lower.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
We know for sure that we will be excluding some of the game buying public with fairly stiff hardware requirements, but we still think it is the right thing to do.
The requirement for GF1/Radeon 7500 as an absolute minimum is fundamental to the way the technology works, and was non-negotiable for the advances that I wanted to make. At the very beginning of development, I worked a bit on elaborate schemes to try and get some level of compatibility with Voodoo / TNT / Rage128 class hardware, but it would have looked like crap, and I decided it wasn't worth it.
The comfortable minimum performance level on this class of hardware is determined by what the artists and level designers produce. It would be possible to carefully craft a DOOM engine game that ran at good speed on an original SDR GF1, but it would cramp the artistic freedom of the designers a lot as they worried more about performance than aesthetics and gameplay.
Our "full impact" platform from the beginning has been targeted at GF3/Xbox level hardware. Slower hardware can disable features, and faster hardware gets higher frame rates and rendering quality. Even at this target, designers need to be more cognizant of performance than they were with Q3, and we expect some licensee to take an even more aggressive performance stance for games shipping in following years.
Games using the new engine will be on shelves FIVEYEARS (or more) after the initial design decisions were made. We had a couple licensees make two generations of products with the Q3 engine, and we expect that to hold true for DOOM as well. The hardware-only decision for Q3 was controversial at the time, but I feel it clearly turned out to be correct. I am confident the target for DOOM will also be seen as correct once there is a little perspective on it.
Unrelated linux note: yes, there will almost certainly be a linux binary for the game. It will probably only work on the nvidia drivers initially, but I will assist any project attempting to get the necessary driver support on on other cards.
John Carmack
No, your original point ("a GeForce 4 would cost me $399 whereas a GameCube only costs $249"") is not valid (and does not equal the point you make in the last post).
1) There are cheaper GF4-based cards available. Any GF4 based card, including the extremely cheap GF4 fulfills what you were referring to in your original post, that is, "a Geforce 4".
2) The card you linked to might not be Nvidia's top of line model, but it's still the second fastest. Most price-aware consumer's, if they'd chose a GF4, would not go for a 4400, but rather for a Ti4200. The store you link to does not have any Ti4200, which leads me to believe it sucks. Most German online stores have GF4 Ti4200 cards for 215 - 250 (including all taxes).
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.