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The Carmack & DOOM
by Steve Gibson, Feb 11, 2002 1:56pm PSTThe Carmack has a very techy .plan update discussing his work on DOOM supporting a few different video cards. Some of you might recall that according to his talk at QuakeCon last year he's been taking the approach of writing what amounts to basically mini-drivers for a few different popular videocards for DOOM. He's just finished wrapping up the Radeon work and has a bunch to say about not only that, but some NVidia stuff:
ATI had been patiently pestering me about support for a few months, so last month I finally took another stab at it. The standard OpenGL path worked flawlessly, so I set about taking advantage of all the 8500 specific features. As expected, I did run into more driver bugs, but ATI got me fixes rapidly, and we soon had everything working properly. It is interesting to contrast the Nvidia and ATI functionality: [snip] On the topic of current Nvidia cards: Do not buy a GeForce4-MX for Doom. Nvidia has really made a mess of the naming conventions here. I always thought it was bad enough that GF2 was just a speed bumped GF1, while GF3 had significant architectural improvements over GF2. I expected GF4 to be the speed bumped GF3, but calling the NV17 GF4-MX really sucks.It's important to note for the newbies, GeForce4 MX (which carmack bags on) and GeForce4 Ti cards are totally different. A GeForce4 Ti card is fast. But if you're buying your videocard based on DOOM, uh.. just wait until a release date is in sight. We'll prolly be seeing GeForce5 cards by then.
Comments
The ATI 8500 (what 4-6 months old at least?) has "pixel shaders" version 1.4 ability on the GPU of the video card.
The brand spanking shiny new GF4 Ti 4600 399$ US video card has 1.3 pixel shader on the chip, what the fuck is with this?
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/gf4/index1.html
Scroll down to the comparison chart there and see just what the Radeon 8500 can do vs Nvidia's GF4.
There's a LARGE amount of features the ATI has that the GF4 does not, really pretty piss poor considering everything, you would expect nvidia to have the better hardware.
What this all boils down to, is if ATI = working well with Carmack (much like nvidia perhaps did in the TNT and Riva 128 days?) we could find the next card from ATI may be _FAR_ better supported than the previous ATI cards and actually somewhat "designed for Doom" much like the GForce series seemed to be "designed for quake".
This all boils down to good things.
In the long run, what I have learnt from this thread, which I didn't know previously is I've now 100% (not 60%) convinced myself to skip the GF4 series and GF4 ultra until I see a card near the XMAS 2002 mark (or not long after?) which grabs my fancy.
This GF2 Pro @ 1024 16bit is actually damned fast (no, I DON'T notice the 16 / 32bit problems 99% of the time) so I'm more than happy to skip another gen so that in the long run my "doom box" = ub4r l33t
Patience is a virtue......
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I'm waiting cause its retarded to run out and buy a $300 card so I can run all my current games slightly faster at 1024x768 and still be CPU bound. You'll buy the card, experience not too spectacular speed gains and be pissed that you still need to go buy a new chip and mobo.
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This sounds familiar.
Isn't this what nearly everybody was saying about the 8500, before it came out.
Yes ATI is going to get better, but if you think that nVidia is just going to stand around doing nothing, then you could be mistaken.
Personally, I get the impression that nVidia is actually holding back.
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time we ship the game
Geforce fucking 5?
Thats another year!
DNF is gonna be out before Doom?
/faints
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It should hold me up til I can affoard a new system, right now all ive got is a tnt with a 450 p2
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When JC gets technical he loses me easily and I used to work on Crytographic systems for security of financial transactions. Ok, not the same field of computers but pretty technical nevertheless......
I have only ever come across 1 person who made me feel the same way (the bit where your eyes cross and your brain shuts down) and he used to know the Mainframe Operating System down to every level (the source code printout for this used to fill a double cupboard so it was reasonably big).
Can you imagine being a driver writer and having JC ringing you up with a problem? You would have to tape the conversation and then have a group discussion to understand it!!!
On the basis that we get hosed on prices in the UK I am going to see what the prices of cards turns out to be before deciding what to get to replace this GF2.
Just be glad that the game is going to run on both ATI and Nvidia
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I also agree that NVidia is beginning tricky naming conventions akin to AMD.
They need to distinguish further between their budget cards and their performance cards.
The entire MX series is budget-oriented and does not deserve the same pre-name as the regular and advanced GeForce3 and GeForce4 as they offer a fraction of the performance.
At least if MX is clearly equated with budget systems, it would be somewhat clearer that buying a GeForce3 ti200/500 is a better performance option than a GeForce4-MX. But hopefully Anand, Sharky, Tom, Kyle, and Ace will make it clear for everyone with benchmark graphs. :)
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How well will either of these cards will run Doom?
(Baring the remark on better cards being available when Doom comes out)
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Once the new DOOM has been released to reviewers we will see sites like anandtech, sharkyextreme, hardocp, tomshardware, aceshardware, and hopefully even the 'Shack (?) posting reviews not only of the game but of how each of the mainstream videocards performs and scales with the new DOOM.
Once all the graphs are posted for us to see, we can make much better informed decisions on which cards will offer a high enough level of performance at decent graphical settings.
I will go ahead and predict that a GeForce3 ti200/ti500 and any level of GeForce4 (outside of the budget MX ones) will be able to run 1024x, high settings with a playable framerate (average of 45fps or higher, IMHO).
Top of the line GeForce4s had better be able to pull a steady 60fps with maxed settings in 1024x or else we should all just skip the GF4 and wait for the GF5.
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ATI will announce a new RADEON 8500XT graphics card and a new RV250 chip in March, at the CeBIT show. The official name, which will be assigned to RV250 is said to be RADEON 8800. Although this name of RV250 implies that this chip will have some architectural differences distinguishing it from RADEON 8500, we still know nothing about it. Maybe these differences will lie with the improved T&L unit, however, we donÂ’t have any evidence proving this information.
The cards built on RADEON 8500XT and RADEON 8800 will be equipped with 128MB high-speed DDR SDRAM, and the chips will be made with 0.15micron manufacturing technology. The chip and memory frequency of RADEON 8500XT cards will equal 300MHz, and of RADEON 8800 cards – 350MHz.
As for the next generation R300 chip, ATI is going to showcase its first samples only in May. The announcement of this GPU supposedly getting the name RADEON 9x00 will take place only in early autumn. There is a great lot of info about R300 features and specs, however, I would doubt its credibility, especially since there is a good lot of time left before the launching, and many things may change. Nevertheless, R300 will evidently be a DirectX 9.0 compatible solution supporting Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0. R300 chips will be manufactured with 0.13micron technology and will work at 350-400Mhz frequency. ATI is most likely to disclose some details about its upcoming R300 to the developers during the CeBIT show. So, we are all waiting impatiently for the more detailed and reliable info in the nearest future.
performance, but it may not be something that can be worked around on current
hardware."
Discussions about a 'high polygon bug' have been floating around on the Rage3D forums for a few weeks now. If ATI does find a solid workaround (ie it is a driver bug only) then it seems the 8500 is (will be) signifigantly better than the GF3 in Doom and most other nextgen games I'd assume. He said it beats the GF3 in every way (that he covered anyway) except "non-textured stencil shadow speed". Maybe now that Carmack has identified the bug as well ATI will do something about it.
Here's hoping. Not like I own either card anyway...
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"GeForce5" crap is already popping up all over the place. Remember, it is lies/junk/jokes....whatever you want to call it. Jensen, CEO of NVIDIA, did say the other night that there would not be a product carrying the name "GeForce5". Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
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Thanks Carmack, now I feel better about my upgrade to the GeForce3 :)
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discuss
from what carmack said the gf3 was a tech upgrade and the gf4 just gives you raw speed, i woul drather have a gf3, and wait for next gen technology.
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http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1580&p=10
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