ATI Talks Game Support, Future Of Graphics Cards

Sergio writes "Slo-Tech have posted an interview with ATI's representative in game developer support, Richard Huddy. He touched on many subjects, including the evolution of DirectX and OpenGL, why ATI doesn't provide much information to Linux driver developers, and the most common mistakes of game developers ('Nine out of ten games under-use the graphics card. That's amazing, and it's been true for the last three or four years.')"

Comments

Re:Nine out of ten games under-use the graphics ca

[Apreche]

That is true. However, if you install the newest DirectX (which will install no matter how shitty your pc is), and you try to play a game written for say a GeForce4 and you have a TNT2, then your pc can figure out what the card should do and what the cpu should do. So, there is no reason for game designers to code to the least common denominator, they just have to code for the newest DirectX/OpenGL and the user's pc turns on available options for their card, and disables the others.

The reason that the graphics card is under-used is for two reasons. The first is that game designers, as you said, want the game to work well on lower end platforms. If your cpu is good enough you can add better graphical features even if your video card doesn't support it. For example Descent 3 adds motion blur if your cpu is L33t enough. However, the main reason that video cards are underused is that it's a fucking pain in the ass.

Let's say for instance that your name is not John Carmack, and you want to make a 3d game. You code it in C++, Cg, Objective C, Visual C++, OpenGL, DirectX9, whatever. You have all these different layers of 3d graphics you have to deal with, unless you just use someone else's engine. You've got shadows, lighting, colors, textures, mip mapping, bump mapping, shading, animating, it goes on and on with the insane number of things you have to do. When new apis emerge that let you use the video card to do more stuff it is very difficult to learn that much more crap.

It happens all the time no matter what you are coding. Ohhh, there's a function in that library that does that for me! I just wasted my time! Ohhh, there's a way that I can make the video card do that really easily and I will save some cpu and some ram! Nobody, sans Carmack, knows this stuff well enough that they can use the graphics card 100% of the time it is possible and better to do so. Except of course in the most graphically simple of programs. However, I do urge game developers to try to use the GPU more than the CPU. It results in many advantages for the gamer.