ATI & Ducks

ATI could almost get away with it if the screen shots were of the same quality. But with the textures clearly fuzzier in the "faster" configuration they don't have much to defend themselves with.

These sort of lazy hacks drive me nuts. Reducing the texture resolution automatically (as it seems to be in this case) restricts users freedom especially as you can achieve the same thing from adjusting the game settings.

It'd be much less offensive if the drivers retuned to different settings which didn't affect the image quality. Ideally ATI should level with consumers and provide an option in the display settings to switch to a Quake 3 engine optimised mode, or an 'auto optimise' mode.

ATI's response to HardOCP has in no way convinced me. Assuming it is just a texture res. hack for now - although they've done tweaks in the past for compressed textures with Quake 3 as well - it cannot be an 'optimisation' that can only benefit that game.

The only conclusion I can draw from this as it was purely for benchmarking purposes, knowing that very little image comparision tests are done post Voodoo vs. 32bit days for Quake 3.

its funny to read about how you guys all go on about this
when most of you guys were the same ones who turned quake 3 into virtua fighter level of graphics on all the other video cards out there to max out your fps

This is why you should only trust reviews that test a wide variety of game engines and synthetic benchmarks - even if it seems more like a dissertation than a review. *cough* Anandtech *cough*

Great link Steve (et al)! Is it a Bad Thing(tm) for ATI to do this? I tend to agree with the final Hard OCP statement:

We think that ATi should be producing Radeon drivers that are 3D engine specific and not game specific. Especially when the one targeted game is a widely used benchmark that people trust.

Amen to that.

They didn't actually test their theory. They only ran a modified version of the Quake program. They should run a different program against both drivers (modified and original) to provide a baseline (that this change only affects Quake 3).

Otherwise they're just blowing hot air.

ATI is gonna be in trouble...

"HardOCP fails to note that as I have mentioned before, there has been a Quake3 reference in the Radeon OpenGL driver since at least the 7143 drivers for the Radeon, though there was no Quake3 reference in the 7075 driver. That still makes the Q3 reference at Least 6 months old, and I don't recall any of us complaining about visual problems on the Radeon in Quake3 since that time."

From rage3d.com ...

How soon before NVIDIA marketing jumps on this and uses it to compare the 'poor' image quality of the 8500 with these drivers to a Geforce 3 Ti 500, in a effort to 'prove' that NVIDIA technology is superior?

this sucks cause when people do reviews and benchmarks, theyll see high q3 scores and thing that they are indicative of the card's performance as a whole, which in this case it wouldnt be and would be very misleading. poo for ati! >:(

Hey, as long as this help the gamers, it is so wrong? Maybe ATI should do a better job of recognize what game it's running instead?

fuckerrrrrrrrrr