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Quake 4 Graphics Performance Compared

Posted by Zonk on from the lush-bloodsplosions dept.

Timmus writes "nVidia's huge lead in OpenGL performance is apparently gone. According to Firingsquad, ATI's latest hotfix driver brings major performance improvements to ATI's RADEON X1800 cards in OpenGL games like Doom 3 and Quake 4. The X1800 XT is now faster than GeForce 7800 GTX, while the X1800 XL is faster than the GeForce 7800 GT in most cases. The article also includes GeForce 6800 Ultra/GT scores, including both in SLI. It's a pretty interesting read if you like graphical benchmarks." From the article: "A little over a week ago, rumors began spreading that ATI was working on a new tool that delivered substantially improved performance to their recently launched X1000 cards in OpenGL titles such as DOOM 3, Quake 4, and many others. Some reports claimed ATIs performance improved by up to 35% in these titles in 4xAA mode. Then, posts on Beyond3Ds forums and sites like Guru3D confirmed these rumors. So how did ATI pull this off?"

10 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. So Close, Yet So Far Away.... by DeadBugs · · Score: 3, Informative

    Apparently it only works at 4XAA and only on the X1800XT. There are also performance differences when playing multi-player versus running time demos.

    This is a step in the right direction. However, this is not the OpenGL driver fix that everyone has been waiting for. It is a manipulation of ATI's new programmable memory controller.

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    1. Re:So Close, Yet So Far Away.... by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Informative

      Apparently you should RTFA.

      1) It does not only work at 4xAA, that is just where the gains are more impressive. With or without AA before they were behind, now they're ahead.

      2) It is not just the X1800XT. The review was a roundup of high-end cards, and as such only included the X1800 XT and X1800 XL (Not just the XT like you suggest). The optimizations should affect ATI's entire product line fom the X1300 on up.

      3) There are no other major games, to my knowledge, that still use OpenGL. As such, this can be considered a general fix for OpenGL performance. General in the sense that it fixes the problem (Poor OpenGL performance) as far as the vast majority of gamers are concerned.

  2. Or its the new NVIDIA drivers by shoptroll · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know what NVIDIA did with the drivers (81.85) released about 1 week ago, but they broke OpenGL support in Doomsday 1.8.6 (3D Source Port of DOOM). According to the changelog it adds OpenGL 2.0 support.

    Not sure if that's related, but if NVIDIA is accidentally breaking support for OpenGL in apps (perhaps deprecated API calls? I dunno) that could have something to do with it.

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    Insert Sig Here
  3. Re:How did ATI... by LLuthor · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually the last few months have seen nothing but great drivers from ATI. I have an X800 in one of my machines and every release from ATI is better than the last. I haven't seen any crashes for a long time, and although I am not a big gamer, I do play games frequently and they have been running great.

    I still stick to Nvidia for the time being, but ATI is nowhere near as bad as they used to be (except for Linux support where they still suck).

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  4. Re:Bought the game for an ATI 9600 xt, useless by LLuthor · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am in the London at the moment, and I bought a 6600GT for £45 from a shop called GHS Technology on Tottenham Court road last friday. That is almost exactly $80.

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    LL
  5. Re:How did ATI... by Guspaz · · Score: 2, Informative

    This isn't a question of ATI having poor drivers, it's a question of taking time to do optimizations.

    The X1000 series features programmable memory controllers. For Quake 4 (And Doom 3, so this may be a general OpenGL optimization) they have put together some new code for the memory controller that provides the large benefits.

  6. Re:How did ATI... by theantipop · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually one of ATi's lead developer's explained that they are simply taking advantage of some of the properties of the new memory controller in the X1000 series. They have optimizations (I would guess) specific to some types of memory calls, and it seems that they just now had time to perfect them in driver. As I understand it, you won't see these performance gains with older Radeons.

  7. Re:OpenGL is much more than Doom3 by Guspaz · · Score: 2, Informative

    Professional applications are best suited to professional graphics cards, not gaming graphics cards. Professional cards use different drivers for good reason. So they are totally irrelevant in this discussion.

    And note that I said major games. Cegeda is a niche product at best, and don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. ATI has a dedicated Linux driver team anyhow, so it is up to that team to put the effort into porting these optimizations to the Linux drivers.

    I should point out that I missed one other major OpenGL game; Half-Life 1. Luckily it doesn't really matter in this context, since cards have been able to run that game at its hard-coded FPS cap (100FPS) for several generations; any OpenGL optimizations would be redundant at this point.

    So as far as fairly recent games that would benefit from such optimizations, I think D3/Q4 is just about it. One could argue that some of the Q3 licenced games are recent enough, but IIRC some of them don't even use OpenGL, and they all run pretty well on even outdated hardware.

  8. Re:How did ATI... by DudemanX · · Score: 2, Informative

    You may have an X800 but if you read the article you'ld see that this performance boost doesn't apply to you. It only works for X1800(and maybe X1600 and X1300) cards that have the programable memory controller. The X800 actualy loses one or two FPS using the new driver, sorry :(

  9. X800XL by alexo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Unfortunately it seems that the previous generation (X800XL) was hurt by the the driver upgrade.