id Software guru John Carmack made a post to Slashdot.org as part of a thread about ATI and NVIDIA's upcoming battle for the next generation of graphics hardware. As is to be expected, his post is somewhat technical, but it does have some good points about the two company's plans and how id's DOOM engine will perform on them (although it really is to early to tell). Here's his post:

The standard lighting model in DOOM, with all features enabled, but no custom shaders, takes five passes on a GF1/2 or Radeon, either two or three passes on a GF3, and should be possible in a clear + single pass on ATI's new part. It is still unclear how the total performance picture will look.

Lots of pixels are still rendered with no textures at all (stencil shadows), or only a single texture (blended effects), so the pass advantage will only show up on some subset of all the drawing. If ATI doesn't do as good of a job with the memory interface, or doesn't get the clock rate up as high as NVidia, they will still lose.

The pixel operations are a step more flexible than Nvidia's current options, but it is still clearly not where things are going to be going soon in terms of generality. Developers are just going to need to sweat out the diversity or go for a least common denominator for the next couple years. I fully expect the next generation engine after the current DOOM engine will be targeted at the properly general purpose graphics processors that I have been pushing towards over the last several years. Hardware vendors are sort of reticent to give up being able to "out feature" the opposition, but the arguments for the final flexibility steps are too strong to ignore.