id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms

id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms
[Oct 07, 2011, 9:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments

Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," getting answers from id on the topic, who express frustration with problems that were largely caused by driver issues. Along the way they also address how the game being designed for consoles holds back the PC edition. "You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," John Carmack tells them. "We chose the latter." He also bluntly addresses why this makes sense for id (emphasis Kotaku's):

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."

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32.

Re: id On RAGE
Oct 7, 2011, 23:26

Creston

32.

Re: id On RAGE Oct 7, 2011, 23:26

Oct 7, 2011, 23:26

Creston

swaaye wrote on Oct 7, 2011, 23:18:
Parallax Abstraction wrote on Oct 7, 2011, 23:11:
It's id's job to ensure that their brand new engine works properly and if that requires special driver considerations, it's their responsibility to contact NVIDIA and ATI and get that done before the game comes out. If they called these companies and said "John Carmack would like to talk to you to make sure id Tech 5 works with your cards", they'd probably have their lead drivers engineers on the phone with him instantly.

My understanding is id Software was in contact with AMD months ago and they did work things out but then AMD fucked up and didn't deliver. NVIDIA drivers work fine, even older ones.

This isn't even anything new with AMD/ATI. Doom3 on Radeons was subpar too. They have some sort of total lack of interest in being aggresive with their OpenGL. NVIDIA owns them in the professional world because of it and occasionally we see it rear its head in gaming. It probably doesn't help that there is major upheaval over there and they seem to be slowly imploding on every front.

Here's my big problem with the "ATI just fucked up" scenario. Rage is a huge game release, and for them to have massive issues while Nvidia has (relatively) few is a big black eye. So are they really fucking up? Did they really just forget about the changes they needed to make for Carmack's Tech5 engine, and then release two (or three, depending on how you look at it) shitty drivers in a row, just because they can't be bothered?

ATI LIVES by its reputation on the PC.

Then on the other side we have id, who have basically all but said "Fuck the PC. Consoles, baby!" What do they care if their game runs like shit on the PC? Carmack just happily blames ATI and Nvidia and we've yet to hear anything about a patch or whatever, other than a statement from the PR guy from BETHESDA saying "Hey, it's being worked on."

So who fucked up? AMD/ATI? Or did Carmack make changes in his engine and then never notified AMD/ATI of those changes, leaving them to play catch-up? It's all speculation either way, but I wouldn't be so quick to hold id blameless.

That said, I do agree that ATI's OpenGL drivers have usually been big piles of shit. I remember how much fun it was to have an ATI card when KOTOR was released, and people had to try and find an old ATI driver and extract the atiogl.dll file from it just to get it to fucking run.