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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?"
pull this off? Money, hard work, and development. Did you think it came from aliens?
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
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.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
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.
Insert Sig Here
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.
LL
does it run on linux?
*ducks*
Seriously, have they made the same improvements in the linux native drivers?
C17H21NO4
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.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
How did the ATi fare when running quack4.exe?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
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.
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."
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.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Let's look at ATI's business process
1) Launch Product
2) Benchmark Onslaught
3) Release better drivers
4) Benchmark Onslaught that beats nVidia
5) Marketing and sales blitz
6) Design product
7) Produce product
8) Announce product availability schedules
9) Look for factory to start making cards
10) ??
11) Profit!
Not that I'm suggesting ATI has severe production issues - if nVidia can kill paper launches, surely ATI could at least try to keep up.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Unfortunately it seems that the previous generation (X800XL) was hurt by the the driver upgrade.