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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?"
ATI's drivers tend to be a bit shabby from the get-go (based on my personal experience over the past five-ish years). Assuming that the initial driver support for the X1000 series was horrible, such a large performance boost is understandable. It used to be that ATI cards were on par with Nvidia's and the poorly written drivers held them back. Can't say when exactly, but ATI started turning things around a bit before the 9800Pro was released.
In these days, bleeps and bloops mean something more
nVidia already HAS optimized their drivers for it. They did that back when Doom 3 was news. ATI did the same.
What ATI is doing this time is tweaking the programmable memory controller in their new cards, not really tweaking the drivers. As I said both ATI and nVidia have already tweaked their drivers for Doom 3. So unless nVidia has some similar tweak up their sleeves (Which they may or may not) then the situation won't change with waiting. I think Doom 3 has been out enough that both companies have grabbed the low-hanging fruit, and even the medium-hanging fruit (And perhaps even the hard-to-reach fruit). The only reason we're seeing this is because of new possibilities opened up by ATI's new hardware.
I'm tempted to say that if it ran Doom 3, it will run Quake 4. I concur with other posters that the performance is on-par, and often better. On the other hands, there are graphically intense scenes too that are as bad as they get. Grab a copy off BitTorrent, see how it runs, and then decide if it runs fast enough to buy the game or not.
I'm with you on that, having been on the ATI bandwagon with an X800 ever since my TI4400 exploded on me. I was just recalling days when some of the more popular games would never render quite right when running on an ATI card.
In these days, bleeps and bloops mean something more
Wasn't Half-Life 1 a Quake engine game? Which brings me to a point...look at the number of games that used the Q3/TA engine, these include MoH series, CoD series JK2 series, RTCW. You can bet a good number will probably be using the Q4 engine.
Of course there are also a ton of games using the various iterations of the Unreal Engine. There is one game with its own engine that will get me to upgrade though.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."