ATI produce tool to increase Doom3 scores

Actually let's keep the discussion going here, but let's see if we can leave out the personal attacks that got the earlier thread locked.

Here is the post that is being referred to:

HEXUS.beans :: ATI produce tool to increase Doom3 scores 'up to 35%' with AA enabled
Posted on Thursday, 13 October, 2005 by Ryszard
ATI Technologies have this morning made a tool available to HEXUS which supposedly improves scores in Doom3 when antialiasing is enabled. Improvements 'of up to 35%' are explicitly mentioned by sources within ATI. The tool seemingly changes the way the graphics card maps its own memory to better deal with handling AA sample data in Doom3's case.

The fix will shortly be rolled into CATALYST 5.11 according to ATI sources and a beta drop of that driver will be made available for testing in due course, before the final WHQL driver from Terry Makedon's CATALYST team is made available for public download in November.

HEXUS are in the process of testing the fix and we'll bring you some scores using the executable tool very shortly. It's unclear if the fix affects other games or whether it solely affects Doom3 via ATI's application detection scheme and their ability to reprogram the GPU's memory controller per application using CATALYST A.I.

More on the tool and the fix as we get it.
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Here are my thoughts from the other thread:

Game specific driver optimizations are great. These things that used to be seen as "cheats" have simply become part of the landscape and an accepted one that is generally not abused any more. I still stand by my thought, that has been attacked by many a fan boy, that it is not a cheat if it does not impact the IQ experience and gives me a more solid gameplay experience.

That all said......

DOOM3 is one of those games that does not benefit greatly from AA implementations. Upping the resolution is the key in DOOM3. You can check our latest numbers here.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODIyLDEw

Also it is worthy to remember the screen cap implementations here as well. I think they have always shown that this is Carmack putting his foot down to the fact that we don't need over 60FPS.

Now where all of this could shine is if we see driver implementations from ATI that give us benefits in upcoming DOOM3 engine games. That is yet to be seen, but we should know very shortly with two new solid DOOM3 engine games on the way. :) Certainly Quake 4 might greatly benefit from this if you are an ATI user, but let's not count our chickens before they hatch.
 
....

Oh, but I do agree with everything you said. The DOOM3 engine is great and hopefully this will give ATI users a good boost.
 
is this ATI starting to utilize their brand new and very flexible memory controller? or is this going to be for all generations?
 
I stand by what I said earlier, a 35% boost in a game as opposed to a benchmark could be a serious boost to ATi. This is especially true if that boost carries on to all games which later license the engine as Kyle notes. I also stand by my statement that this will have to occur at very little or no loss to IQ. Optimizations which reduce IQ are not IMO optimizations, they are "work arounds". In the end, we will have to see benchmarking from reputable sites that include both raw FPS and IQ from released drivers before we can get too excited.

That being said, I would love to see this happen and that it includes older cards. I was already looking at buying a cheap AGP upgrade to replace my 9700Pro on my LAN system so I could be ready for Q4. Generally, I don't care about IQ too much in my LAN machine since I turn off shadows, flares, reflections, etc. in order to maximize frame rates and help find people camping. If this works out, it would save me some jingle until I finally build a PCI-E LAN machine.
 
I agree that an "optimization" that doesn't negatively impact IQ is not a "cheat", and I welcome these types of advancements with open arms, especially if they help all D3 engine games, as has been said.

However, if this is purely a Doom3 optimization, ATi shoulnd't have wasted their time. D3, when compared to upcoming games, wasn't much more than a fancy playable tech demo, and will be forgotten. (My copy of D3 hasn't even been installed since I first bought it and beat it--a stark contrast to HL2, UT2k4, etc).

D3 is so dark that you can hardly see aliased lines anway, so AA just doesn't provide much benefit.

Let's hope ATi can manage to get this working for future D3 engine titles as well.
 
Trimlock said:
is this ATI starting to utilize their brand new and very flexible memory controller? or is this going to be for all generations?
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly. If they can program their hardware (in this case, the memory controller) to get the best performance out of every game, that's great. The challenge for them is to do it for a wide variety of games, not just one or two of the most popular shooters.

As far as AA not mattering much in Doom 3, all I can say is, if I can run AA without impacting framerates too much, I will. After all, free AA is better than a sharp stick in the eye. :p
 
Rori said:
a 35% boost in a game as opposed to a benchmark could be a serious boost to ATi. This is especially true if that boost carries on to all games which later license the engine as Kyle notes.
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- especially in OGL games, as that has traditionally been ATIs achilles heel - and it is quite a shame they still didn't get it streightened out with their x1k series IMHO. Any improvement is good in my book, as long as it does not affect IQ that is...
 
jebo_4jc said:
However, if this is purely a Doom3 optimization, ATi shoulnd't have wasted their time. D3, when compared to upcoming games, wasn't much more than a fancy playable tech demo, and will be forgotten. (My copy of D3 hasn't even been installed since I first bought it and beat it--a stark contrast to HL2, UT2k4, etc).
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D3 is a nice high tech demo and okay for benchmarking. Nothing more than that. Quake 4 will be out in a week and might have some replay value so I can imagine that Ati wants to tweak it's drivers for this game and other upcoming games (??) based on the D3 engine.
 
Oooh... Dont tease me with thoughts of OpenGL optimization. By and large, 90% of my time on my LAN machine is spent playing CS. 35% bump in CS would make me cry for joy, I swear.

I seem to remember hearing rumors that ATi was working on a "from the ground up" OpenGL re-write. Oh how I wish it could be true!
 
Rori said:
Oooh... Dont tease me with thoughts of OpenGL optimization. By and large, 90% of my time on my LAN machine is spent playing CS. 35% bump in CS would make me cry for joy, I swear.

I seem to remember hearing rumors that ATi was working on a "from the ground up" OpenGL re-write. Oh how I wish it could be true!
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You mean the original CS? What video card are you using? Any of today's video cards should be able to run CS at about 200fps at any quality settings.

If you are talking about CS:Source, the Source engine is Directx9, so an OpenGL optimization wouldn't affect it.
 
It's a 9700Pro and yes it works just fine for old school CS which is what I play. I think you are a little optimistic though with the 200fps. With everything on, it hovers around 60 with occasional dips into the 20s. With everything off, it stays mostly in the 90s with occasional forays into the 50s.

Averages don't matter to me... in any review I look at mins first. ;) It's always in the middle of a firefight with 5 guys in the rain effect on Aztec that FPS matters to me, not when I am running down a tunnel.


edit - After reading that, I thought I better qualify. That's at 12x10 on an XP 1800+.
 
Actual numbers now. Impressive.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=3668

On a side note it looks like the 5.11s will be the first to support the x1x00 series.

Then again, the fact that they're using the X1800 to test pretty much means this performance improvement is limited to the x1x00 series in all likelihood and the ring bus architecture.
 
jebo_4jc said:
However, if this is purely a Doom3 optimization, ATi shoulnd't have wasted their time. Let's hope ATi can manage to get this working for future D3 engine titles as well.
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"As well as supporting Doom3, the tool is said to increase performance in all OpenGL titles when using antialiasing." - Hexus
...clever release just in time before Quake4 comes out, ATI :D
 
wizzackr said:
"As well as supporting Doom3, the tool is said to increase performance in all OpenGL titles when using antialiasing." - Hexus
...clever release just in time before Quake4 comes out, ATI :D
Click to expand...

Hopefully those 35% increases aren't based of low end or mainstream cards but high end :cool:
 
I agree with Kyle, I'm all for game specific optimizations as long as it doesn't make IQ worse. Anything to improve the gameplay experience I am all for.

This part sounds very encouraging:

As well as supporting Doom3, the tool is said to increase performance in all OpenGL titles when using antialiasing.
Click to expand...

This is AWESOME IMO:

The tool seemingly changes the way the graphics card maps its own memory to better deal with handling AA sample data in Doom3's case.
Click to expand...

Remember, the arbitration unit with the new ring bus memory controller is completely programmable, they can change arbitration and the weight system with data requests to each client. It is way cool to see this being utilized.
 
so, brent, does that mean this tool only applies to cards with the new ring bus?

it would be nice if this tool effected x800's
 
Rori said:
I stand by what I said earlier, a 35% boost in a game as opposed to a benchmark could be a serious boost to ATi. This is especially true if that boost carries on to all games which later license the engine as Kyle notes. I also stand by my statement that this will have to occur at very little or no loss to IQ. Optimizations which reduce IQ are not IMO optimizations, they are "work arounds". In the end, we will have to see benchmarking from reputable sites that include both raw FPS and IQ from released drivers before we can get too excited.

That being said, I would love to see this happen and that it includes older cards. I was already looking at buying a cheap AGP upgrade to replace my 9700Pro on my LAN system so I could be ready for Q4. Generally, I don't care about IQ too much in my LAN machine since I turn off shadows, flares, reflections, etc. in order to maximize frame rates and help find people camping. If this works out, it would save me some jingle until I finally build a PCI-E LAN machine.
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QFT.

As long as their method 1+1+2 = 4 or 2+2 = 4 as long as the end result is correct who cares how they got there! as long as there is no loss - which there should not be.

I knew ATI's new technolgoy in these cards are what would give it that boost over the 7800* line once developers began to use them.
 
An ATI employee just posted something very interesting over at B3D: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=595463&postcount=155

This change is for the X1K family. The X1Ks have a new programmable memory controller and gfx subsystem mapping. A simple set of new memory controller programs gave a huge boost to memory BW limited cases, such as AA (need to test AF). We measured 36% performance improvements on D3 @ 4xAA/high res. This has nothing to do with the rendering (which is identical to before). X800's also have partially programmable MC's, so we might be able to do better there too (basically, discovering such a large jump, we want to revisit our previous decisions).

But It's still not optimal. The work space we have to optimize memory settings and gfx mappings is immense. It will take us some time to really get the performance closer to maximum. But that's why we designed a new programmable MC. We are only at the beginning of the tuning for the X1K's.

As well, we are determined to focus a lot more energy into OGL tuning in the coming year; shame on us for not doing it earlier.
Click to expand...
 
Oh well, as I thought. Looks like the x1800 has a LOT of room to grow. Too bad the x8x0 series doesn't have much but then again we knew that (outside of a complete OpenGL driver rewrite.)
 
John Reynolds said:
An ATI employee just posted something very interesting over at B3D: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=595463&postcount=155

This change is for the X1K family. The X1Ks have a new programmable memory controller and gfx subsystem mapping. A simple set of new memory controller programs gave a huge boost to memory BW limited cases, such as AA (need to test AF). We measured 36% performance improvements on D3 @ 4xAA/high res. This has nothing to do with the rendering (which is identical to before). X800's also have partially programmable MC's, so we might be able to do better there too (basically, discovering such a large jump, we want to revisit our previous decisions).

But It's still not optimal. The work space we have to optimize memory settings and gfx mappings is immense. It will take us some time to really get the performance closer to maximum. But that's why we designed a new programmable MC. We are only at the beginning of the tuning for the X1K's.

As well, we are determined to focus a lot more energy into OGL tuning in the coming year; shame on us for not doing it earlier.
Click to expand...

If that is true, you have to give big KUDOS to the engineers at ATI and their new memory controller. Let's just hope we see ATI realize the power of their new hardware on a more basic level in that hopefully we will not see this have to be a game specific optimization. But hey, if it does, then surely the top titles will get it.

Hopefully there is yet some excitement to be had in the X1800XT. :) Glad we have yet to get to that card. We just might be able to show it off in a much better light that we could have last week.
 
you know, i tried playing Unreal Tournament 2004 last night. a little background - i've been playing different versions UT for the past 3-4 years, and lately have been on Need For Speed Underground spree.

so... i can't play it. i got bored in 5 minutes. same ole shooting, same ole running around, same campers who drive you mad... i need to feel wowed. i need to be able to crank up at least visuals in the game. i can't wait for Quake 4! - and if ATI can get their act together and indeed release something that'll let me play Q4 with high AA/AF settings on less-than-latest hardware, all the more power to them. I'll try again.

/me patiently waits for Q4 + CAT5.11 :D
 
No bump for my old 9700? Imma cry... :(

As for the quote that John Reynolds posted, I don't see anywhere in there that these optimizations would be limited to OpenGL titles. If any title with bandwidth limitations could be improved by this type of fix that could SERIOUSLY change the way people are looking at the x1000s. I know that right now this software "tweak" is only a rumor and I am naturally leery of claims to gain 35% performance overnight, but this is getting VERY interesting.


ps - Educate the old and out of touch with net lingo, what exactly is QFT?
 
But It's still not optimal. The work space we have to optimize memory settings and gfx mappings is immense. It will take us some time to really get the performance closer to maximum. But that's why we designed a new programmable MC. We are only at the beginning of the tuning for the X1K's.
Click to expand...
Interesting. It appears the X1k family has some long legs after all.
As well, we are determined to focus a lot more energy into OGL tuning in the coming year; shame on us for not doing it earlier.
Click to expand...
About time I say! It seems much of their effort have been put into optimizing for only one of the past year's biggest graphics engines, and they needed to change that.
Trimlock said:
so, brent, does that mean this tool only applies to cards with the new ring bus?

it would be nice if this tool effected x800's
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I got the impression this tool only helps the X1k cards from the Hexus article.

Edit: QFT = Quoted for truth.
 
yea i got that too from the post at B3D, but it looks like they can gain SOME performance from x800's, might take more time
 
Rori said:
ps - Educate the old and out of touch with net lingo, what exactly is QFT?
Click to expand...

Not that any self-respecting person uses the silly phrase, but QFT means Quoted For Truth.
 
emailthatguy said:
now ati has sites doing pr releases for them lmao too funny.
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?
How is releasing a new driver to a review site a "pr release"? I'm sure I could find plenty of sites discussing future advances in the next version of Forceware...
 
jebo_4jc said:
Interesting. It appears the X1k family has some long legs after all.About time I say! It seems much of their effort have been put into optimizing for only one of the past year's biggest graphics engines, and they needed to change that.
Click to expand...

Well, this will definitely please some parts but concentrating on DX9 titles was a smart move for ATI if they had to pick due to limited resources. It's not like over the next 12months anything particularly amazing is going to happen in the OpenGL arena in terms of games. Quake IV has already been declared average and Prey is probably six months out and RTCW2 is an even longer wait. ATI has been conecentrating on what we care about in the next six months, BF2, F.E.A.R., CoD2, Oblivion, B&W2, AoE III, Star Wars: Empire at War, X3, and Civ IV; all DirectX games The only games on the OpenGL roster are ones that definitely fall at least a notch below in terms of selling power.
 
Rori said:
No bump for my old 9700? Imma cry... :(

As for the quote that John Reynolds posted, I don't see anywhere in there that these optimizations would be limited to OpenGL titles. If any title with bandwidth limitations could be improved by this type of fix that could SERIOUSLY change the way people are looking at the x1000s. I know that right now this software "tweak" is only a rumor and I am naturally leery of claims to gain 35% performance overnight, but this is getting VERY interesting.


ps - Educate the old and out of touch with net lingo, what exactly is QFT?
Click to expand...

Yeah me too my 9800 :-(
 
its a step in the right direction, their OGL support in their driver is being completely redone, this is them making a specific optimization for a game (and possibly all games using the engine)

this might make the x1600 a worthy buy
 
For those who are wondering exactly how ATi is doing this, sireric who works at ATi posted this little blurb at Beyond3D.

sireric said:
There's some slides given to the press that explain some of what we do. Our new MC has a view of all the requests for all the clients over time. The "longer" the time view, the greater the latency the clients see but the higher the BW is (due to more efficient requests re-ordering). The MC also looks at the DRAM activity and settings, and since it can "look" into the future for all clients, it can be told different algorithms and parameters to help it decide how to best make use of the available BW. As well, the MC gets direct feedback from all clients as to their "urgency" level (which refers to different things for different client, but, simplifying, tells the MC how well they are doing and how much they need their data back), and adjusts things dynamically (following programmed algorithms) to deal with this. Get feedback from the DRAM interface to see how well it's doing too.

We are able to download new parameters and new programs to tell the MC how to service the requests, which clients's urgency is more important, basically how to arbitrate between over 50 clients to the dram requests. The amount of programming available is very high, and it will take us some time to tune things. In fact, we can see that per application (or groups of applications), we might want different algorithms and parameters. We can change these all in the driver updates. The idea is that we, generally, want to maximize BW from the DRAM and maximize shader usage. If we find an app that does not do that, we can change things.

You can imagine that AA, for example, changes significantly the pattern of access and the type of requests that the different clients make (for example, Z requests jump up drastically, so do rops). We need to re-tune for different configs. In this case, the OGL was just not tuning AA performance well at all. We did a simple fix (it's just a registry change) to improve this significantly. In future drivers, we will do a much more proper job.
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Looks promising. Also it appears that ATi can improve their performance even more than 35% after polishing off the drivers. Good stuff.
 
Moofasa~ said:
For those who are wondering exactly how ATi is doing this, sireric who works at ATi posted this little blurb at Beyond3D.

Looks promising. Also it appears that ATi can improve their performance even more than 35% after polishing off the drivers. Good stuff.
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a 35% improvement with just a registry change WOW :eek: , hopefully ati can improve there drivers even more to take advantage of the programable MC/

chilly
 
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