Benchmark Games

EvilAvatar has an interview with Jake Simpson of Raven Software talking about 3D APIs and all the programmer mumbo jumbo. Jake makes a pretty interesting statement concerning benchmarks being used on Quake engine games that was touched on a while back actually in the "Quake aint important" item here a while back.

The question was why shouldn't we continue to use Quake or its ilk as a benchmark. Here's why. Quake III and it's predecessors use a specific set of OpenGL instruction pipelines, and not only do the video card manufacturers know it, Id actively encourages them to optimize their drivers to take advantage of this fact. While Quake III was in development, Carmack released a document detailing the specific rendering instructions and their combinations he used so driver creators could tailor their drivers to Quake III. Now it's a little unfair to pin any driver woes on Mr. Carmack since he's already done so much for the driver movement in the first place, but it is an inescapable fact that many drivers ARE optimized to Quake, since, as we've already established, Quake and Games Using The Quake Engine Sells Video cards, and manufacturers know this well.