NVidia Recommended Graphics Card For Doom 3

Griffon4 writes "Nvidia announced today that they have been branded the recommended graphics card for id's forthcoming PC FPS Doom 3. Now I'm wondering: Recall a little over a year ago that Carmack said the Nvidia card at the time was just a slight bit more worthy than the ATI? Jump forward to today - are we getting a real recommendation based on id's own experience or just seeing the end result of a financial deal that benefits both?" Other possible factors (apart from NVidia simply being the better graphics card for Doom 3) include the alleged origination of some Doom 3 Alpha version leaks, unlikely to endear ATI to id, and, of course, ATI already having a major bundle deal in place with a certain other FPS.

Comments

Look At Origin

[Babbster]

Considering this is coming from Nvidia, this is clearly, purely, a financial deal between Nvidia and Id. This isn't a .plan file from Carmack or even an interview with the same, which might be more interesting from a technical point of view. This is a cobranding, most likely decided upon in light of ATI's association with Valve and Half-Life 2.

Re:Look At Origin

[thumperward]

Or maybe, just maybe, the fact that OpenGL support on ATi cards has been historically rubbish hasn't endeared id to them?

I'd imagine Nvidia are keener to push this, given that it's a direct advert for their products. id gain nothing from doing press releases for nVidia, except maybe the ire of those poor, poor Radeon users convinced that they've won the Gaming Wars (whatever those were).

- Chris

Re:Look At Origin

[Babbster]

Then again, when Id demoed Doom 3 the first time, they used ATI (9700 cards, as I recall) to do it, so they can't hate ATI that much.

Re:Look At Origin

[nelsonal]

Not the war, but it was an important battle. The GeForce 2 and 3 had much better driver support than anything ATi offered, especially for the then new Windows 2000. However N'Vidia first started having problems slightly before they were announced as the video providers for the XBox, they missed a targeted tape out for the NV31 or NV35 (future GeForce 4), and ATi took the lead with better products and driver support they they had had in several years. The war isn't over until one of the two is out of business. We'll see how ATi manages with Microsoft breathing down their necks, but it might be easier now that gamers don't expect product refreshes every 6 months.

Re:Screw Carmack

[Stubtify]

I believe this is what he has done, as it says "recommended" graphics card. More likely than not this is just business, ie. "here's X million dollars, recommend our graphics card." To write directly for a single graphics card platform would be crippling/pissing off your audience.

Re:Screw Carmack

[asteinberg]

I've played the same game in both OpenGL and DirectX (Unreal 2003 or Unreal2...I forgot which one) and they flawlessly. [sic] In fact, I can't tell which one is better.

You can't tell the difference because for that particular game, they are used in essentially identical ways. I would assume that if the Unreal series is going to bother supporting both APIs, they simply added a layer of abstraction to their graphics code, coded the engine using that abstraction, and then created implementations of the abstraction for both OpenGL and Direct3D that look exactly the same by design.

This, however, implies nothing about the quality of either API, it merely suggests that the developers coded to the greatest common subset of both APIs. Of course, it does seem that this subset is good enough to make a nice-looking game, which seems to suggest that it doesn't really matter from an end-user perspective which API the developer chooses. Therefore...

But if your going to program a game in an API, why not DirectX? It handles Video, Audio, and input. OpenGL is nice, but it only does video (that I know of).

This is totally irrelevant - we just saw that Direct3d and OpenGL are equally capable so why choose the one that limits you to a single platform? The fact that DirectX handles other things is totally irrelevant - you can use OpenGL alongside the other components of DirectX without a problem (and this is in fact what Carmack has done in the past). You can also just use other libraries for other aspects - for example, SDL works just great. While certainly not of the scope of these commercial games, I found that SDL+OpenGL was more than adequate for my own game, and I got the bonus of being able to make Linux, Mac, and even Windows versions with only about 2 total lines of code changed (had to switch where the #include's pointed for each platform, though a more clever build environment probably could've handled that). Offhand, about the only thing we couldn't do with SDL + OpenGL that DirectX provides is the network coding/matchmaking stuff from DirectPlay, but AFAIK most commercial games don't use this anyway.

Re:Why refer to theinquirer.net...

[illuvata]

because that post has nothing to do with which graphics card is better for doom3

Re:Screw Carmack

[FlashBuster3000]

Yeah, plus the Fact that I can play DommIII under Linux, you insensitive clod! (at least I hope so)

And for sound, etc.. There are other API's that do the same stuff. OpenAL for example.

So, why using DirectX, when there are such good other API's ;-)

Just advertising

[tprime]

This is just another advertising ploy on nvidia's part along the same thread that Gatorade is the official sports drink of the NFL. NVIDIA hasn't had great press lately (console wise) and needed some fresh good press.

Re:Does it REALLY help both companies?

[aliens]

I'm not quite sure, but you realize that ATI's cards will run Doom3 just fine and Nvidia will run HL2 just fine.

This is all a lot of posturing, no way a major studio would hurt sales by making a game perform so much better on one video card as to make the other unplayable.

And judging by the fact that people have written very very nice wrappers for nvidia only demos (dawn) so that they run even better on ATI hardware doesn't make me worry too much.

Although I reccomend not getting a new video card until the next generation NV40/R420 come out.