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: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.

Why refer to theinquirer.net...

[z01d]

When the man himself once made a post righ here on /.?