If someone can name someone who has been programming games for longer than Carmack
David Braben.. Less prolific though.
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If someone can name someone who has been programming games for longer than Carmack
Ahhh. I stand corrected. I thought Carmack was still the guy behind the new Doom engine.Not really. You needed a 66 MHz Pentium to run Doom at a smooth 35 FPS with the screen at max size.
Carmack did not code the engine that Doom (2016) runs on. Tiago Sousa is the genius behind that one, though admittedly id Tech 6 still uses features developed by Carmack for id Tech 5.
Drivers these days accommodate games. But with limited time and money you can't accommodate everyone for every device. The most they could do is expose more of their API to developers.
Not really. You needed a 66 MHz Pentium to run Doom at a smooth 35 FPS with the screen at max size.
Carmack did not code the engine that Doom (2016) runs on. Tiago Sousa is the genius behind that one, though admittedly id Tech 6 still uses features developed by Carmack for id Tech 5.
The first lesson is: Nearly every game ships broken. We're talking major AAA titles from vendors who are everyday names in the industry. In some cases, we're talking about blatant violations of API rules - one D3D9 game never even called BeginFrame/EndFrame. Some are mistakes or oversights - one shipped bad shaders that heavily impacted performance on NV drivers. These things were day to day occurrences that went into a bug tracker. Then somebody would go in, find out what the game screwed up, and patch the driver to deal with it. There are lots of optional patches already in the driver that are simply toggled on or off as per-game settings, and then hacks that are more specific to games - up to and including total replacement of the shipping shaders with custom versions by the driver team. Ever wondered why nearly every major game release is accompanied by a matching driver release from AMD and/or NVIDIA? There you go.
The second lesson: The driver is gigantic. Think 1-2 million lines of code dealing with the hardware abstraction layers, plus another million per API supported. The backing function for Clear in D3D 9 was close to a thousand lines of just logic dealing with how exactly to respond to the command. It'd then call out to the correct function to actually modify the buffer in question. The level of complexity internally is enormous and winding, and even inside the driver code it can be tricky to work out how exactly you get to the fast-path behaviors. Additionally the APIs don't do a great job of matching the hardware, which means that even in the best cases the driver is covering up for a LOT of things you don't know about. There are many, many shadow operations and shadow copies of things down there.
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Why are games broken? Because the APIs are complex, and validation varies from decent (D3D 11) to poor (D3D 9) to catastrophic (OpenGL). There are lots of ways to hit slow paths without knowing anything has gone awry, and often the driver writers already know what mistakes you're going to make and are dynamically patching in workarounds for the common cases.
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Part of the goal is simply to stop hiding what's actually going on in the software from game programmers. Debugging drivers has never been possible for us, which meant a lot of poking and prodding and experimenting to figure out exactly what it is that is making the render pipeline of a game slow. The IHVs certainly weren't willing to disclose these things publicly either, as they were considered critical to competitive advantage. (Sure they are guys. Sure they are.) So the game is guessing what the driver is doing, the driver is guessing what the game is doing, and the whole mess could be avoided if the drivers just wouldn't work so hard trying to protect us.
Tell him to work with the GPU driver teams. Is he a good team player or is he just the prodigy that goes on a one man team thinking he's the greatest thing ever?
I like the guys work, but he sure is an arrogant bastard that just gets me in the wrong way. I just don't like the guy.
https://impellerstudios.com/ the guys at Impeller wrote the original X-Wing games. I bet they could give him a run.If someone can name someone who has been programming games for longer than Carmack, I'd love to hear it. I find it pretty believeable that a guy with 30 years of programming experience beats a kid that might have 10 to 15 years of experience.
Carmack has a tendency to make clickbait proclamations. If driver teams had the flexible deadlines and operating budgets of game developers, they wouldn't need Mr. Carmack's learned help.Carmack believes that GPU driver teams often make mistakes in driver development that ultimately break optimizations. This is something Carmack feels he can do better than them at the moment.
Aside from the texture issue which was solved shortly after launch, it did run impressively smooth. Too bad the game just wasn't good.
Not really. You needed a 66 MHz Pentium to run Doom at a smooth 35 FPS with the screen at max size.
Carmack did not code the engine that Doom (2016) runs on. Tiago Sousa is the genius behind that one, though admittedly id Tech 6 still uses features developed by Carmack for id Tech 5.
David Braben.. Less prolific though.
I personally think he is rotting at Oculus with this VR fad.