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.
Ya know, folks, reading all this, it occurrs to me that the success or failure of a GPU corp like NVIDIA, ATI, or (once upon a time) 3dfx is dependent not so much upon actual quality as upon preceived quality.
The internal workings of these things have become so complex that one really can't keep up with all the advances unless you have either (A) too much time, or (B) a job working with this sort of thing in some capacity. (And I say this from the standpoint of being darned good at both programing and VLSI design, if I do say so myself.)
So is it really any wonder that ATI gave Valve a fat sack of cash? And that Valve subsequently said that the new NVIDIA cards sucked? Or that NVIDIA was investigated by the SEC (Although, I must confess, I am ignorant as too the details of that.) Or that GPU companies have a habit of engaging in quite undignified displays of one-upsmanship?
I think we should take all of this was a grain of salt. It doesn't matter, at least to me, whose top-of-the-line card is slightly faster, because spending twice as much to get 10% more frames per second that you monitor cannot display and your eyes cannot see, is futile.
What *I* care about is what's going to give me decent performance on the current crop of games, for the least amount of my hard-earned dollars. When I notice that the new titles are starting to chug, I read few reviews, and buy whatever seems to fit the bill at the time.
Perhaps we ought to be grateful that this game of king-of-the-video-card-hill is pushing the amount of resources that game companies can draw on to make their stuff look great, but, all the same, it's not something that most of us need to worry about unless we enjoy doing so.
This comment was edited on Sep 18, 00:16.
The internal workings of these things have become so complex that one really can't keep up with all the advances unless you have either (A) too much time, or (B) a job working with this sort of thing in some capacity. (And I say this from the standpoint of being darned good at both programing and VLSI design, if I do say so myself.)
So is it really any wonder that ATI gave Valve a fat sack of cash? And that Valve subsequently said that the new NVIDIA cards sucked? Or that NVIDIA was investigated by the SEC (Although, I must confess, I am ignorant as too the details of that.) Or that GPU companies have a habit of engaging in quite undignified displays of one-upsmanship?
I think we should take all of this was a grain of salt. It doesn't matter, at least to me, whose top-of-the-line card is slightly faster, because spending twice as much to get 10% more frames per second that you monitor cannot display and your eyes cannot see, is futile.
What *I* care about is what's going to give me decent performance on the current crop of games, for the least amount of my hard-earned dollars. When I notice that the new titles are starting to chug, I read few reviews, and buy whatever seems to fit the bill at the time.
Perhaps we ought to be grateful that this game of king-of-the-video-card-hill is pushing the amount of resources that game companies can draw on to make their stuff look great, but, all the same, it's not something that most of us need to worry about unless we enjoy doing so.
This comment was edited on Sep 18, 00:16.
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