DOOM 3 & DX9 [Sep 17, 2003, 7:08 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
With all the discussion lately about how Half-Life 2 will run on ATI hardware
compared with NVIDIA accelerators, BonusWeb.cz
shot off an email to id Software's John Carmack to ask how DOOM 3 and other
games are likely to be impacted by the difference between the two graphics
platforms running DirectX 9. Here's how he responded:
Unfortunately, it will probably be representative of most DX9 games. Doom has a custom back end that uses the lower precisions on the GF-FX, but when you run it with standard fragment programs just like ATI, it is a lot slower. The precision doesn't really matter to Doom, but that won't be a reasonable option in future games designed around DX9 level hardware as a minimum spec.
'I remember reading from Carmack or yadda yadda yadda that either the 5900 or the 9800 is the cards to own to run the new games. WTF did this change? At what point in the developer updates did nVidia just all of a sudden blow so hard in their oppinion?'
Nothing has really changed. Hell, Carmack in his .plan from ages ago clearly indicated that FX cards performed full precision ARB2 rendering/shaders at half the speed of ATi solutions.
Part of the problem is people are assuming that the D3 engine is indicative of future performance with the DX9 level feature-set. This is not the case. The fact is that D3 isn't shader dependent like HL2 with DX9. Rather it is dependent on incredible bandwidth, multitexturing fill-rate, fast stencil and fixed function dot-3 shading - things that NV3x is actually very good at. (Check out Beyond3D forums for more good info on this). Furthermore, the D3 performance numbers are even more misleading for DX9 because they are in Open GL (Nvidia's strength) and Carmack has specifically coded the game with a custom NV3x path and FP16 shaders so that the register problem is not telling...
If you're look for someone to blame though you might want to start looking at review sites who use 3dmark2k3, Gunmental et al (basically PS 1.4 benchmarks) like they are really DX9 PS 2.0 benchmarks and giving the NV3x high marks for scoring 300 as opposed to 270 FPS in Q3 without even looking at image quality comparisons in driver revisions.
So many supposedly decent hardware sites were implicated in this, and rather than fess up to their erroneous conclusions they tried to insinuate that Valve and ATi had some conspiracy going on - it was pathetic.
This comment was edited on Sep 18, 00:27.
Nothing has really changed. Hell, Carmack in his .plan from ages ago clearly indicated that FX cards performed full precision ARB2 rendering/shaders at half the speed of ATi solutions.
Part of the problem is people are assuming that the D3 engine is indicative of future performance with the DX9 level feature-set. This is not the case. The fact is that D3 isn't shader dependent like HL2 with DX9. Rather it is dependent on incredible bandwidth, multitexturing fill-rate, fast stencil and fixed function dot-3 shading - things that NV3x is actually very good at. (Check out Beyond3D forums for more good info on this). Furthermore, the D3 performance numbers are even more misleading for DX9 because they are in Open GL (Nvidia's strength) and Carmack has specifically coded the game with a custom NV3x path and FP16 shaders so that the register problem is not telling...
If you're look for someone to blame though you might want to start looking at review sites who use 3dmark2k3, Gunmental et al (basically PS 1.4 benchmarks) like they are really DX9 PS 2.0 benchmarks and giving the NV3x high marks for scoring 300 as opposed to 270 FPS in Q3 without even looking at image quality comparisons in driver revisions.
So many supposedly decent hardware sites were implicated in this, and rather than fess up to their erroneous conclusions they tried to insinuate that Valve and ATi had some conspiracy going on - it was pathetic.
This comment was edited on Sep 18, 00:27.
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