Quake 4 Graphics Performance Compared

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?"

Comments

Same old, same old...

[stienman]

if(Window.Title=="DOOM"){
employGraphicsShortcuts();
}

As always, the graphics card makers quantify the leading game's usage of the API and take shortcuts as needed in order to improve gameplay. Since Doom is released, they can also release these driver shortcuts. These same shortcuts wouldn't necessarily work under another program, and may cause unintended artifacts, crashes, etc.

The only question is why hasn't nVidia released their tweaks yet?

This would only be news once they've both optimized their drivers for this game and one clearly has the advantage.

-Adam

Re:How did ATI...

[Sancho]

Maybe.
Or maybe they tweaked their drivers for Doom3 and Quake4? Haven't read the article, so don't flame me if this is mentioned, but it wasn't all that long ago that it came out that ATI had been doing this for other popular games/benchmarks. It was easy to do (tweaking for specific cases instead of improving performance in the general case) and it made them look like the best on paper--win/win for ATI.

Yes but

[Xarius]

does it run on linux?

*ducks*

Seriously, have they made the same improvements in the linux native drivers?

great line from article

[Surt]

As shown by our testing, with one simple driver update, ATI's gone from last to first place in Quake 4 performance. There's a wealth of data you can glean from these benchmarks.

Of course it's a comparison between two companies, so they were either going from last to last or last to first, there wasn't any other possibility.

Re:OpenGL is much more than Doom3

[yoyhed]

HL1 was OpenGL, Direct3D, and Software. When it came out, D3D was the default setting, although now with Steam OpenGL is (and it always ran way better in OpenGL on both ATI and NVidia).

I believed for a long time, too, that the fps in HL1 was capped at 100fps, but not so. If you enable developer mode (either "developer 1" in console, or -developer added to the shortcut, I don't remember exactly), it uncaps it.

In addition to D3/Q4, Starbreeze's Chronicles of Riddick uses OpenGL (and has all the features of the Doom3 engine). I'd consider that a major game. Other than that, though, I'd only note Far Cry's OpenGL renderer (which isn't officially supported and has minor rendering issues), and Q3-engine games (which are falling out of the "current" realm, although CoD is current enough).

Anyway, just some minor things I thought I'd clarify. I agree with you on the whole.