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.
No matter how you approached it the initial 3Dmark03 results told us precisely what has been discovered today. Namely that the FX series was strongest in GT1 which was the largely DX7 style rendering, it could have been stronger there because the FX does multi-texturing two pass stuff well and that was one of nVidia's complaints - namely that the test was only a single texture one for the most part.
As you increase the level of shader useage the FX's performance dropped off. When you got to GT4 the 5800 displayed performance equivalent to a 9500 (which was ATi's medium performance card of the time.). That was reflected in the scoring with the 5800 Ultra getting around 2600 3Dmarks and the 9700 Pro scoring around 4300. Wanna guess what a 9500 scored? About 2300 as I recall.
Remember it was the rectification of this quite large performance gap along with the noticeable image quality drop in 3Dmark03 that kicked a lot of the investigation off into precisely what drivers are doing. We have had a pretty clear indication with 3Dmark03, code creatures, Shadermark and the like all telling the same story - shader performance was lacklustre in the extreme on the NV3x series.
As you increase the level of shader useage the FX's performance dropped off. When you got to GT4 the 5800 displayed performance equivalent to a 9500 (which was ATi's medium performance card of the time.). That was reflected in the scoring with the 5800 Ultra getting around 2600 3Dmarks and the 9700 Pro scoring around 4300. Wanna guess what a 9500 scored? About 2300 as I recall.
Remember it was the rectification of this quite large performance gap along with the noticeable image quality drop in 3Dmark03 that kicked a lot of the investigation off into precisely what drivers are doing. We have had a pretty clear indication with 3Dmark03, code creatures, Shadermark and the like all telling the same story - shader performance was lacklustre in the extreme on the NV3x series.
Date
Subject
Author
Copyright © 1996-2025 Stephen Heaslip. All rights reserved.
All trademarks are properties of their respective owners.
Privacy Policy. Manage Cookie Settings.
News CGI copyright © 1999-2025 James "furn" Furness & Blue's News. All rights reserved.
Chatbear v1.5.0/blue++: Page generated 17 June 2025, 19:06.