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ATi to get performance boost in Doom3
- Thread starter ^eMpTy^
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AgentxofxChaos
Agent of [H] Chaos
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I am very interested to see what results arise from this. Since I am am still yet to buy a card yet (although I am still leaning towards nvidia due to the added features in tech) but it will be interesting to see what happens, whether or not in affects IQ, stability etc. It would also be a relief to those who bought an ATI card that were worried about the performance difference if the drivers to work out well. That and maybe if they work out, then all the fanboy wars wil calm down a little bit.
So here's to seeing what happens.
tranCendenZ
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ATI likely will be able to improve their OpenGL driver, but it will be difficult to make up the gains found by Nvidia's FP16pp and Ultrashadow II technologies.
FragMagnet
[H]ard|Gawd
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^eMpTy^ said:
I have to agree about OGL. It's too bad really, as I have always felt that DX was a bloated API. Glide was a a "true" direct to hardware, OGL a little less, but still very efficient. You'd think it was easier to program for without the bloat, not sure why everyone else went to DX ??
This sounds kind of familiar, anyone remember that farcry patch that was supposed to work wonders for Nvidia? Oh yeah! it was just released, I almost forgot about it, and it did what, 5-10% boost on SOME levels of farcry? For some reason if this happens i doubt the performance increase will compare to the hype. We'll just have to wait and see...
The good thing about it is if ATi does lock its software driver teams in the basement for a week without sleep and do turn up a good driver, they won't have to wait for WHQL certification.
I'm sure they have the final version of Doom3 (unlike us who have to wait another week) and reverse engineering it should be a lot quicker than trying to make a forward looking driver on it.
I'm sure they have the final version of Doom3 (unlike us who have to wait another week) and reverse engineering it should be a lot quicker than trying to make a forward looking driver on it.
tranCendenZ
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ohgod said:
Yeh but its gonna take more than 2 weeks to make a significant improvement. The Doom3 benchmarks were used with the latest beta cat drivers provided by ATI, so I'm doubtful anything will be seen before the release of Doom3.
burningrave101
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ohgod said:
Well their stupid for putting it off as long as they have and waiting until they got their asses kicked in D3 to do something about it.
If Doom 3 wasn't one of the most highly anticipated games in PC gaming history then you could bet ATI would be screwing around again and not worrying about their OpenGL drivers.\
theinquirer said:
What planet is he living on? lol
I guess you really wouldn't call KOTOR and Call of Duty significant games last year EVEN IF they both were nominated for GOTY.
There are alot of other really popular OpenGL games as well. I think OpenGL should get used alot more then it does.
Warriorprophet
[H]ard|Gawd
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Well you gotta see the tradeoffs too, ATi is still winning on HL2, and farcry can patch for SM2.0b and make up the same ground nvidia did with SM3.0, same with Halo and various other top end names, so all they really hafta do for Doom3 is show up and not suck... I for one don't care about Doom3 a wit.
tranCendenZ
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Warriorprophet said:
wtf? hl2 isn't out yet. Last beta benchmark showed the 6800U and x800xtpe tied.
Actually it looks like sm2.0b will not be in the updated 1.2 patch due to stability issues, only 2.0 and 3.0.
Halo only supports plain SM2.0 and that is all it will ever support.
According to the official benchmarks ATI's $499 flagship card is losing to Nvidias $399 card in Doom3.
burningrave101
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Warriorprophet said:
How is ATI STILL winning on HL2 when there havn't been any HL2 benches? lol
HL2 will have SM 3.0 and could run just as well on the 6800's. Dont listen to crap Gabe Newell is saying just because ATI filled his pockets full of gold.
And rumors are saying the SM 2.0b path will be removed from the 1.2 patch because it causes issues with ATI cards. We wont know for sure until its re-released. And Far Cry didn't even make use of what SM 3.0 can do over SM 2.0. It did something that could of been done with SM 2.0b. When games really start utilizing SM 3.0 to its fullest you can bet SM 2.0b wont be able to keep up.
Here is a new review with several D3D benchmarks and the MSI 6800u won in the majority of them against the PE.
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_con...D95DDC4A8F963FC2C3E5C22B472046C051310D91DDA7A
Even if ATI does even up with the fps with doom3 it will suck in image quality. Why bother going thru all those problems, just get NVIDIA 6800GT that is $100 less then X800XT. ATI will have to smudge and dull the doom3 as much as possible to get even with the fps, and again why bother with all that. But I know that ATI will not be able to pull of the same gimmick like they doing with the DirectX, cause they will be cought big time cause OpenGL is cheatproof...
burningrave101
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R1ckCa1n said:Every thread gets the same posts........
gl ATI
Feel free to contribute to the ATI side. Noone is stopping you.
There isn't much to say though because everything on the ATI side is based off speculation and the fact remains that currently the 6800's are leading the way for Doom 3.
Here's a quick qestion.
To the people that say get the 6800GT becuase it beats the X800XT in Doom 3. Granted that the GT does pull ahead in Doom 3 over an X800XT. Are all of you going to only play Doom3 for the rest of you're lives?
So far the X800XT PE beats any 6800 in any D3D game (HardOCP proves it again and again).
So the way I thought when I bought my x800XT over a 6800U is, 98%(+/- a bit) of current and upcoming games are in D3D, so why buy a card that is going to be infferior in 98% of games and far superior in the other 2% of the games (OpenGL). Thats why i bought an X800XT over a 6800U.
I am no fan of D3D, personally i hate D3D compared to OpenGL/Glide, but you have to look at the mainstream games, and most are D3D. The X800XT is the card for D3D.
To the people that say get the 6800GT becuase it beats the X800XT in Doom 3. Granted that the GT does pull ahead in Doom 3 over an X800XT. Are all of you going to only play Doom3 for the rest of you're lives?
So far the X800XT PE beats any 6800 in any D3D game (HardOCP proves it again and again).
So the way I thought when I bought my x800XT over a 6800U is, 98%(+/- a bit) of current and upcoming games are in D3D, so why buy a card that is going to be infferior in 98% of games and far superior in the other 2% of the games (OpenGL). Thats why i bought an X800XT over a 6800U.
I am no fan of D3D, personally i hate D3D compared to OpenGL/Glide, but you have to look at the mainstream games, and most are D3D. The X800XT is the card for D3D.
joecartoon22
Weaksauce
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this is the same thing that happened to nvidia back when the 9700pro came out. the person at the top falls asleep and number 2 works harder. hope this round is a reality check for ati. get your ass in gear its a race!
OriginalReaper
Bad Trader
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s256, please don't turn this into nVidia vs ATi.
Regarding the 'Doom3 for the rest of you're lives?' bit, you should know by now that iD is famous for licensing their engines. Even Call of Duty is based off the late 90s Quake3 engine.
However, I will try to tell you why I bought an nVidia over ATi (this being a very satisfied owner of a 9600 Pro card.)
First of all, PS3.0 means nothing to me. I don't play at 1600x1200 4xaa 16xaf. I don't go over 1280x1024 2xaa 4xaf trilinear. No game will be coded exclusively in PS3.0. Anything in 3.0 will also be written in 2.0. For this reason, I was considering both brands equally. However, both cards (specially the X800) are fast enough at 2.0 that the boost in 3.0 isn't worth it. FarCry proved this to me.
From the benchmarks I saw, and from the news I read, I realized that the X800 is an extention of the 9800, which is an extention of the 9700 core. ATi has, since 2002, optimized this core. The 6800, on the other hand, just came out. There is more headroom in the driver efficiency.
But the biggest thing I noticed is that nVidia and ATi were about even in DirectX benchmarks. DirectX 8 didn't/doesn't even matter anymore. Both flavors pull hundreds of frames per second with their hands tied behind their backs. In OpenGL, however, nVidia showed domination in everything from Call of Duty to Neverwinter Nights to Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
Why did I choose nVidia?
DirectX: nVidia < ATi
OpenGL: nVidia > ATi
I predicted that ATi would get destroyed at Doom3, and that HL2 will be about equal. So far, I'm half right.
I chose the 6800 Ultra.
Regarding the 'Doom3 for the rest of you're lives?' bit, you should know by now that iD is famous for licensing their engines. Even Call of Duty is based off the late 90s Quake3 engine.
However, I will try to tell you why I bought an nVidia over ATi (this being a very satisfied owner of a 9600 Pro card.)
First of all, PS3.0 means nothing to me. I don't play at 1600x1200 4xaa 16xaf. I don't go over 1280x1024 2xaa 4xaf trilinear. No game will be coded exclusively in PS3.0. Anything in 3.0 will also be written in 2.0. For this reason, I was considering both brands equally. However, both cards (specially the X800) are fast enough at 2.0 that the boost in 3.0 isn't worth it. FarCry proved this to me.
From the benchmarks I saw, and from the news I read, I realized that the X800 is an extention of the 9800, which is an extention of the 9700 core. ATi has, since 2002, optimized this core. The 6800, on the other hand, just came out. There is more headroom in the driver efficiency.
But the biggest thing I noticed is that nVidia and ATi were about even in DirectX benchmarks. DirectX 8 didn't/doesn't even matter anymore. Both flavors pull hundreds of frames per second with their hands tied behind their backs. In OpenGL, however, nVidia showed domination in everything from Call of Duty to Neverwinter Nights to Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
Why did I choose nVidia?
DirectX: nVidia < ATi
OpenGL: nVidia > ATi
I predicted that ATi would get destroyed at Doom3, and that HL2 will be about equal. So far, I'm half right.
I chose the 6800 Ultra.
burningrave101
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s_s256 said:
Thats not true at all. The X800XT PE and 6800u are tied for the performance crown in D3D. The settings you choose to use and the part of the level you test determines which is faster.
The 6800's only weakness is AF. nVidia is suppost to be working on new optimizations in the 62.xx series drivers and if they are pretty good it will most likely put the 6800's ahead of the X800's in the majority of D3D benches.
If you disable AF on the X800XT PE the 6800u wins almost every time in D3D games. The X800XT PE shines in the fact it has better AF optimizations and can run high AF without losing any performance. The 6800's do much the same thing with AA performance.
The 62.01 drivers gave a really nice Far Cry performance boost. The 61.77 drivers also fixed performance issues in Far Cry for the 6800's. All the reviews i've seen by hard are using older 61.45 drivers. The 6800u could very well be beating the X800XT PE with the 62.01 drivers w/ SM 3.0 enabled.
And if you've seen the SM 3.0 Far Cry performance results you would know that the 6800u wins about half the time and the PE wins about half the time.
http://techreport.com/etc/2004q3/farcry/index.x?pg=1
You need to get out and read some more reviews if you think the X800XT PE beats the 6800u in the majority of D3D games.
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_con...D95DDC4A8F963FC2C3E5C22B472046C051310D91DDA7A
Hard tests in-game with FRAPS which alot of the time isn't truly accurate because it adds extra variables such as AI interaction which changes with each run. Its impossible to get the same results twice. You just have to take averages and hope you followed the same path and about the same actions happen over and over again which isn't likely. FRAPS can also be optimized for just like any other benchmark. And we all know how ATI likes to optimize
. And Hard only uses a handful of D3D games like Far Cry, BF: Vietnam, Painkiller, and one or two others. How does that equate for D3D performance when those are the games most highly optimized for by ATI and nVidia? lol
ATI is getting the majority of their performance from Brilinear filtering. Briliner filtering is lower quality then Trilinear. The 6800's will run full Trilinear and dont lose alot of performance. The X800's can't run Full Trilinear except through a registry hack i believe and then i dont know for sure how its done and if it can only be done in certain games. They also lose alot of performance with their Tri and AF ops disabled.
HeavenX said:
what? image quality will suck? for years, ATI has beat Nvidia in terms of image quality, hardocp showed that quite clearly in reviews of the cards in farcry. sure, nvidia improved their image quality by a great deal, but that doesn't mean ATI's image quality is shit.
OriginalReaper said:
wtf? the 9700 core was based off the .15 micron manufacturing process, it was a hot mother f#%$er.... the 9800 pro was very similar, just with a .13 micron manufacturing process, to make it cooler, and increased clock rates.. the x800 is very different, it has 16 pixel pipes, 4 vertex engines, 256mb gddr3, and countless other enhancements. it's very different from the 9800 cards. and just because nvidia made something "new" doesn't mean it's good. remember the fx cards that were more useful as a leafblower than for playing games? now i'm not a fanboy of ATI or anything, back in 2002, i used an old geforce3... all i'm saying is i think ati should have a chance to improve their drivers before we judge them... and remember, just because the 6800 beat it in the doom3 benchmarks, doesn't mean it didn't run like a bat out of hell... it still kicked ass.
Bah, its tough to compare apples to apples.
Yes, Ati does a version of optimized trilinear (at least with the 9600 and X800 lines) Ati also does an extra step in their AA, as its gamma corrected (slightly better than Nvidias in theory anyhow) In practice though, the differences are so minute that its almost never seen. Nvidias 6800 AF is much closer to what ATi's 9x00 and X800, but they also do an extra layer of filtering in certain driver sets (Which unfortunately IMO, although it does more work, it also does a worse job than without that extra filter.) Nvidias AF is also much slower than ATi's. ATi has fast and very accurate specialized lighting (AF/phong/spot/etc) NVidia has fast normal lighting (4 lights/pass intead of 3) Nvidia has fast DX7/8 shadows, ATi has fast DX9 shadows. ATi has slow DX7/8 fog. I could go on forever...
The big issues that will popup with Doom3 are the 8x0 (NV30) 32x0 (6800) and precision differences. Now its been said that Doom3 was designed for an 8x0 architecture from the ground up, so ATi is automatically at a disadvantage with any of their x1 designs unless they can figure out a way to make it more efficient on their hardware. Which is totally possible, as ATi does have schemes set up for textures that are never seen, and extensive Z-cull abilities that could be modified as a hack and slash solution for extra speed. (Essentially to run more like a Nvidia card, than its native capablities, at least for this one game.) ATi seems to have already found a way to use part of its 3Dc technology with a Red<>Alpha swap (not as fast as native 3Dc, but not bad) to fit with Doom3's deciding to go with standard RGBA? on the textures.
I'll wait for people to actually play the game before commenting on precision.
Yes, Ati does a version of optimized trilinear (at least with the 9600 and X800 lines) Ati also does an extra step in their AA, as its gamma corrected (slightly better than Nvidias in theory anyhow) In practice though, the differences are so minute that its almost never seen. Nvidias 6800 AF is much closer to what ATi's 9x00 and X800, but they also do an extra layer of filtering in certain driver sets (Which unfortunately IMO, although it does more work, it also does a worse job than without that extra filter.) Nvidias AF is also much slower than ATi's. ATi has fast and very accurate specialized lighting (AF/phong/spot/etc) NVidia has fast normal lighting (4 lights/pass intead of 3) Nvidia has fast DX7/8 shadows, ATi has fast DX9 shadows. ATi has slow DX7/8 fog. I could go on forever...
The big issues that will popup with Doom3 are the 8x0 (NV30) 32x0 (6800) and precision differences. Now its been said that Doom3 was designed for an 8x0 architecture from the ground up, so ATi is automatically at a disadvantage with any of their x1 designs unless they can figure out a way to make it more efficient on their hardware. Which is totally possible, as ATi does have schemes set up for textures that are never seen, and extensive Z-cull abilities that could be modified as a hack and slash solution for extra speed. (Essentially to run more like a Nvidia card, than its native capablities, at least for this one game.) ATi seems to have already found a way to use part of its 3Dc technology with a Red<>Alpha swap (not as fast as native 3Dc, but not bad) to fit with Doom3's deciding to go with standard RGBA? on the textures.
I'll wait for people to actually play the game before commenting on precision.
if that's the case, i seriously doubt it will be that big of a difference in texture quality. after all, carmack himself said "...but it doesn't visibly impact the quality of the game unless you know exactly what to look for on a specific texture."
OriginalReaper said:
Holy Shit. A post with some weight to it. First one around here I have seen in a while. I like your reasoning on why you chose the 6800 over the X800.
I think the X800 has the hardware to run Doom3 on the same level as the 6800, but there is some definete driver inefficiencies (?Spelling) going on there. I hope it is all balanced out in the end, since I plan on running my G9700-ProM for a bit longer.
burningrave101
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eraser_16 said:
The X800 doesn't beat the NV40 in terms of IQ. You should check some other IQ analysis on other sites. The only thing that was pointed out being better on the X800's was the Anti Aliasing but at times they were comparing the 6800 with 2xAA to the X800 with 4xAA.
The Far Cry issues were ALL corrected in the 1.2 patch. And whenever it releases you will see the 6800's have the same IQ as the X800's.
The drivers are also new for the 6800's and Anti Aliasing issues in games can just be bugs at times. Hard has been using some of the older 61.45 drivers instead of the newer ones that have been released more recently.
You can run full Trilinear on the 6800's. You can't on the X800's. The defeats the whole idea of the X800's having better IQ.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=60&type=expert&pid=11
eraser_16 said:
umm...before you go "wtf?ing" others, make sure you have your facts right. The only ATi cards that were .13 micron last generation were the 9600 cards. You 9800pro was the same process as the 9700pro...15micron.
And overall, the X800 carries the same features as the 9800, so basicaly it is just a faster 9800 core which is achieved by the things you mentioned...more pipes...faster memory...and a smaller manufacturing process.
burningrave101 said:
i didn't say the X800 beats the 6800 in IQ, i just said that for the past several years it did, and now that Nvidia improved their IQ, everyone thinks that ATI is inferior in IQ, i personally would like to see some screenshots comparing the two. i bet you can hardly notice the difference
eraser_16 said:
Don't argue with Burningrave. You will NEVER EVER EVER win. There is not enough hot air in the world to bring him down.
IQ is today is such a lame arguement. Both the last & current gen ATi and current nVidia have great IQ, it's a moot point nowdays.
Hey, I gotta defend DirectX here. Although OpenGL can look better, and does a heck of a whole lot of more visual things, it lacks the capability to smoothly integrate with the rest of the gaming experience.
Like sound and network play, which seem to be just interleaving into the frames of video, running concurrently to the 3D, but its not an actual integrated part of it. Which BTW, might explain the 60FPS cap, so the network code does not go all wonky at high FPS < just a personal guess, but I'd bet willing to be an accurate one.
Like sound and network play, which seem to be just interleaving into the frames of video, running concurrently to the 3D, but its not an actual integrated part of it. Which BTW, might explain the 60FPS cap, so the network code does not go all wonky at high FPS < just a personal guess, but I'd bet willing to be an accurate one.
Met-AL said:
umm...wtf? "You 9800pro"
anway, i'm going to call the BS card on this one... the 9800 is not based on the .15 micron manufacturing process. it uses the .13micron man. process... you need to get your facts right. the 9500 and 9700 are .15micron, 9600 and 9800 are .13 micron. that's why the 9800 pro doesn't have a humungous cooler on it, it's just a little piece of aluminum with a fan on it.
You are another example of people guessing facts. You really don't know wether your right or wrong about this, which invalidates just about everything you say.eraser_16 said:
Here is the first result googled "9800pro .15 micron
http://gear.ign.com/articles/424/424414p1.html
Like I said before, get your facts right.
Here's some more for ya
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articleid=472&catid=2