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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."
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.
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).
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.
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.
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);
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 |
"...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."
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."
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. ;)
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?
Unfortunately, as both the GF4 Go and Mobile Radeon 7500 lack hardware pixel shaders, they will not be able to render Doom3 in its full glory. Of course they will be able to run it, but many of the graphical goodies will either be missing or will need to be (very slowly) computed on the CPU.
As for 32 vs. 64 MB, I'd go for the latter if you want to run Doom3. Surfaces in Doom3 can contain up to 5 texture maps, which means tons of RAM usage at anything but low texture detail. If you run out of room on the card, you need to store textures in main memory and access them over the AGP bus, which is too slow for that sort of thing. IIRC both the GF4 GO and Mobile Radeon 7500 are available with 64 MB, although I suppose one sometimes doesn't get the choice when buying a laptop.
Basically, the top-of-the-line 3D cards of today are going to be necessary to run Doom3 decently, so the top-of-the-line mobile 3D cards--which are about a generation behind the desktop--are going to be able to run it, but somewhat mediocrely. Of course, Doom3 probably won't be out for at least a year, maybe a year and a half. By that time you'll be able to buy a laptop which runs the game beautifully. If you have to buy a laptop now then it'll be a bit tougher. Kind of makes you wish laptop 3D cards were upgradable like desktop ones...
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.
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
This is the key question.
What better way to attract women than to be playing Doom III on a train within a week of launch and to be kicking ASS!
If your laptop has a nice velvetty 'keyboard nipple' pointer you have a second angle with which to get them going! Chicks really dig those! "ooooh! it feels so soooft!"
All aboard the love train!!!
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:
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?"
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.
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
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
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
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