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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.
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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.
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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
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.
I would say that an analysis at nvidia and at ATI would also show a completely different corporate philosophy regarding driver development (I can't vouch for this, nor do I have any first hand knowledge : It's just a hunch). With nvidia hardware, the drivers (I'm normally a Windows guy, so we're talking Wintel here) install professionally, they work superbly, they continually support even ancient chipsets (TNT users are seeing performance improvements with each detonator release), and they are feature rich. With ATI, in every experience that I've had the installs have been horribly amateurish, the drivers have been GPFing nightmares, the documentation is horrible, and is usually accusatory of the customer (I recently came across one of these "All your problems are belong to you" sort of documents with a ATI TVWonder PCI). ATI also likes to orphan products, so even only slightly dated products often get relegated to the un-updated trash heap. I suspect, and again this is only a hunch, that ATI treats driver and application development as an nuisance, and only as something to be done when the product is on retail shelves and to entice customers (a very short term approach), whereas nvidia treats it as a scientific continual pursuit of perfection for all their customers.
If I sound down on ATI, I'm not really : They have proven themselves to have extraordinary hardware guys who make, literally, the best stuff in the business, however their ability to continually shoot themselves in the foot with a horrible software development record is hard to fathom : Talk to anyone about ATI, and 95% of the time they'll relate some driver nightmare they've had with an ATI card.
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.
"I still think that overall, the GeForce 4 Ti is the best card you can buy. It has high speed and excellent driver quality."
He said the Radeon 8500 should be faster but isn't, and "the driver quality is still quite a ways from Nvidia's, so I would be a little hesitant to use it as a primary research platform."
That's hardly the glowing endorsement of the Radeon that the story poster made it out to be.
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