Carmack on AMD vs Nvidia

[Sycraft]

I'm quite sure Carmack likes nVidia better and it probably has to do nothing with getting paid off. Reason is his engines use OpenGL. ATi's OpenGL performance has never been on par with their DX performance. Back in the day it was abysmal, even non-functional, then it got working but pretty slow, now it is fairly competent but still not on par with DX.

nVidia? They've treated it as a native API from day one. DX or OGL, both work just as good, both are fully supported.

So no wonder he likes nVidia better.

 

[Sycraft]

That doesn't mean id has had anything to do with it beyond providing the engine code to the developer. I also haven't played Brink so I can't say whether or not it's good or terrible.

Ya and I wouldn't use the Brink engine as its strongpoint. Brink is not a particularly good looking game, it crashes more than it should, and it's performance on ATi cards is not great (since it is OpenGL). Had it been made with UE3/3.5 I imagine it would be better looking, faster, and more stable.

I have not been impressed with iD's engines lately. We'll see what iDTech 5/Rage bring but iDTech 4 never impressed me. Yes, that includes Doom 3. Personally I though UT2004 looked better. Doom's realtime lighting was kinda neat, but didn't look that good in actual practice IMO.

 

[serpretetsky]

Although Valve uses code from NVIDIA in the source engine, so that may be another reason.

hmmm?

 

[defaultluser]

How do I bong my buck and twak them, again

 

[NaturalViolence]

I think you're all forgetting about some of the dev tools nvidia has created that have become quite popular, and the fact that ATIs GLSL support was so poor for so many years (and let's not forget about CGSL). Plus just like AMD/ATI, some game developers work hand and hand with them to develop code.

Just because something favors one brand doesn't mean the company that made it is being paid by the hardware developer. Lots of open-source projects favor one brand over another far more than any commercial application yet you would never dare accuse them of being bribed because it would sound ridiculous. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying don't jump to conclusions.

 

[H-street]

ATI/AMD cards are winning a lot of the benchmarks right now for when you straight-out make synthetic benchmarks for things like that, but our games do get more hands-on polish time on the Nvidia side of things

See i think its the opposite, Nvidia very heavily pushes 2 synthetic benchmarks to show superiority

#1: Unigene Heaven and its extreme tesselation - Nvidia trumpets this as a "look how good we are" in the tesselation department

and then

#2: 3dmark w/included physics score: They trump this one were the physx score hyper inflates the results.



As someone already mentioned though, Carmack likes Nvidia because nvidia has been a good standard OpenGL platform through the years, including in the Q1 days - it was either 3dfx or Nvidia and when 3dfx went away (not to mention 3dfx used a sortof minigl for their ogl) all that was pretty much left was Nvidia for dev platform.

IMO i think carmack likes Nvidia just out of habit through the years.

 

[martinmsj]

Think some people are confused here. "Support" also comes in the form of money which isn't necessarily a bad thing (in any industry, the strongest support you can give is money.) The mistake some people make is automatically assuming some malicious context when reading about NVidia or AMD "support." In addition, don't kid yourself into thinking NVidia hasn't provided full "support" to ID.

In short, giving any type financial support to a development studio does not imply sabotage especially when it contributes to keeping people employed, studios in business, etc...

(Yes, there was the Batman:AA incident.)

Back in the day it was because OpenGL wasn't worth a shit on ATI cards. It had nothing to do with a "bag of money." id was just an OpenGL shop and ATI was far from having it's shit together when it came to that API. These days I couldn't say. I believe all the more recent work id has done has all been DirectX based so OpenGL performance is irrelevant.

I don't think I can agree you in whole Dan. My first real accelerator D) was the G4 4200 (awesome card back in the day.) After that I had my first top of the line video card, the 9700 PRO. OpenGL games ran great still. Yes, I had one or two issues with OpenGL and they weren't bad at all and no where near broken until Doom 3. I honestly can not take Carmack's word and use OpenGL to back it up.


Doom 3

The game was demoed on ATI cards early in development. When it came out it ran terrible on all ATI cards. I almost believed OpenGL was completely F'd on ATI cards until a Rage3D forum member by the name of Humus came along. The guy (who went on to work for ATI's driver team a few years later) posted a short guide to modifying settings in the config file, known as the Humus mod. After that the game was playable on my 9700 PRO and NVidia gap was actually reasonable for an NVidia endorsed game.

I remember Carmack and Humus going back and forth. At the end of the day, I got to enjoy Doom 3 (It scared the hell out of me and I loved it) and later on a 6800GT, Resurrection. I still remember the first weekend I got the Geforce 6800 GT. Besides loving the gorgeous demo (apparently Nalu/Dawn were down by a SquareEnix artist, wish they still had them) I went back to Doom 3 just to see the visual difference between the Humus mode IQ and stock config on the 6800GT.

It was down right criminal what Carmack did (or didn't do) on ATI cards and Doom 3, thus I just can't take OpenGL as his justification.

 

[martinmsj]

Snip...

IMO i think carmack likes Nvidia just out of habit through the years.

Yea, this is the notion I got when read the article.

 

[Ghys]

What extreme fanboizm? One example please. This thread is super tame and rational.

I don't agree. I read the thread and kept thinking people only see things as black or white, depending on their preferences. I agree though, it's quite tame compared to usual fanboyism. Anyways I didn't want to be OT. Sorry about that

 

[HohnyF]

It was down right criminal what Carmack did (or didn't do) on ATI cards and Doom 3, thus I just can't take OpenGL as a justification.

Carmack did on ATI cards? lololol

Not the ATI who took ages to implement OpenGL semi properly, or that Humus fellow with his IQ fix?

 

[ShuttleLuv]

I trust him. My 5870 was a great card in 09, but I enjoy my nvidia card I have at the moment.

 

[Decibel]

Ati hate brigade is funny

Fermi cards win benchmarks in certain titles against their radeon counter parts and by doing carefull selection of titles and resolutions tested you can prove any conclusion you want.

Your logic is flawed. You could just as easily say "Radeon cards win benchmarks in certain titles..." You're oversimplifying the situation and could just as easily have the opposite opinion.

That said, right now I'd buy a 6970 if the damn thing would fit in my case. (And I had the need/want to upgrade... Not so patiently waiting on 28nm...)

hmmm?

Kids these days...

Valve licensed the Quake engine to make Half-Life. At one point they forked the engine into Source and GoldSrc. GoldSrc shipped as Half-Life, and Source got all of their fun tweaks and upgrades, but deep down there is still original Quake code in there somewhere

 

[Dan_D]

Think some people are confused here. "Support" also comes in the form of money which isn't necessarily a bad thing (in any industry, the strongest support you can give is money.) The mistake some people make is automatically assuming some malicious context when reading about NVidia or AMD "support." In addition, don't kid yourself into thinking NVidia hasn't provided full "support" to ID.

In short, giving any type financial support to a development studio does not imply sabotage especially when it contributes to keeping people employed, studios in business, etc...

(Yes, there was the Batman:AA incident.)





I don't think I can agree you in whole Dan. My first real accelerator D) was the G4 4200 (awesome card back in the day.) After that I had my first top of the line video card, the 9700 PRO. OpenGL games ran great still. Yes, I had one or two issues with OpenGL and they weren't bad at all and no where near broken until Doom 3. I honestly can not take Carmack's word and use OpenGL to back it up.


Doom 3

The game was demoed on ATI cards early in development. When it came out it ran terrible on all ATI cards. I almost believed OpenGL was completely F'd on ATI cards until a Rage3D forum member by the name of Humus came along. The guy (who went on to work for ATI's driver team a few years later) posted a short guide to modifying settings in the config file, known as the Humus mod. After that the game was playable on my 9700 PRO and NVidia gap was actually reasonable for an NVidia endorsed game.

I remember Carmack and Humus going back and forth. At the end of the day, I got to enjoy Doom 3 (It scared the hell out of me and I loved it) and later on a 6800GT, Resurrection. I still remember the first weekend I got the Geforce 6800 GT. Besides loving the gorgeous demo (apparently Nalu/Dawn were down by a SquareEnix artist, wish they still had them) I went back to Doom 3 just to see the visual difference between the Humus mode IQ and stock config on the 6800GT.

It was down right criminal what Carmack did (or didn't do) on ATI cards and Doom 3, thus I just can't take OpenGL as his justification.

Let's also not forget that the leaked Doom 3 E3 demo was running at barely playable frame rates on ATI hardware at the time it was leaked. The 9800 Pro was top dog at the time. The X800 series came out after Doom 3 had launched or right around the time of the launch. (I can't remember the exact times and dates.) So yeah, it was demoed on ATI hardware but it didn't run worth a shit on it at the time.

A 9700 Pro is at least double the speed of a GeForce 4 Ti4200. Even when the OpenGL performance was crap, it was still probably faster than the GeForce 4 Ti 4200, but not as fast as it should have been. ATI also had trouble with image quality in OpenGL most of the time. ATI also eventually produced Doom 3 optimized drivers which actually removed their performance deficiet from running the game. These were official, and not modded drivers. (Though they could have been based on that Humus guy's work, I don't know.) I used these on my 9600 Pro and my X800 Pro. Believe me, I was playing Doom 3 at the time too. Initially, performance was abysmal. In fact at one point the ATI drivers optimized for Doom 3 had the Radeons running better than any NVIDIA cards did at the time. However this performance didn't translate to other OpenGL based games. These were supposedly developed with ATI and id working together as I recall.

I had never heard of the "Humus" guy on Rage3D. Then again it wasn't a forum I ever frequented. I just remember what happened with official drivers.

 

[martinmsj]

Carmack did on ATI cards? lololol

Not the ATI who took ages to implement OpenGL semi properly, or that Humus fellow with his IQ fix?

The Humus fix came first. During the whole Humus vs Carmack, ATI actually communicated with Humus and contributed to a driver out of that. (Warning, don't remember exact details, I do know Humus went on to work for ATI.) I guess the point of my rant was that the initial 7-8 FPS the game ran at certainly felt like a result of apathy towards anything not NVidia. His public comments at the time supported it.

That's about all I remember though and that was the last time I ever had any problems. I enjoyed the X1800 AIW (awesome card), 8800 GTS 320MB, 275 GTX... wait I take it back.

The 470 GTX has been giving me driver problems. Meh, that's another thread.

I had never heard of the "Humus" guy on Rage3D. Then again it wasn't a forum I ever frequented. I just remember what happened with official drivers.

He was a contributer to that optimized driver I think. After that he was known as Catalyst Maker or got that title. (All hazy to be honest. He did get a job at ATI)

Edit:

Your post throws me back to the old days when new GPU tech came with not 1 but 3-4 flag ship tech demos. X8XX/68XX XT/GT/ULTRA/XT PE. NVidia using XL/XT on inferior parts while ATI used GT/Ultra on inferior GPU's to mix up each others lime up. Loved the GPU wars back then.

 

[Dan_D]

Again as Ir ecall the fixes for Doom 3 in their optimized driver's didn't work for other games or didn't work nearly as well. I recall the benches in the day showing better performance than NVIDIA cards in Doom 3 and in other OpenGL games, ATI's cards still suffered.

Again ATI just never did fully have it's shit together with regard to OpenGL.

 

[Mr. K6]

I had a 9800Pro and picked up Doom 3 when it came out - never had a problem. It's interesting reading all about this now, I had no idea.

 

[Gnasher]

Carmack is a sellout, who really gives a rat's arse what he says?

 

[serpretetsky]

Valve licensed the Quake engine to make Half-Life. At one point they forked the engine into Source and GoldSrc. GoldSrc shipped as Half-Life, and Source got all of their fun tweaks and upgrades, but deep down there is still original Quake code in there somewhere

I was not aware quake 1 engine had "nvidia code". What kind of code are we talking about here?

All i knew is that at some point carmack programmed quake to run on opengl, which really showed off the voodoo cards back then. I was not aware of any collaboration with nvidia.

 

[Decibel]

Crap my bad... I read too fast and for some reason thought you were talking about iD.

Of course since part of the article is John Carmack talking about support from NVIDIA... nah... I messed up. Oops.

 

[Dan_D]

I had a 9800Pro and picked up Doom 3 when it came out - never had a problem. It's interesting reading all about this now, I had no idea.

It's not that the game ran horribly bad at the time. It just could have run better on ATi hardware than it did. It wasn't until the Doom 3 optimized drivers came out that ATi card owners really got to see what the game was capable of looking like.

 

[Revdarian]

Well i found what Carmack said at the time of Doom3 about R300 vs NV30, found it in a forum and since it was a huge wall of text i will just copy the link to it:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=3149

In the end it boiled down to "when both cards played with the standard ARB2 path, R300 > NV30, but when NV30 ran it's personalized NV30 path, NV30>R300", and the performance hit for the NV30 to go from the personalized path to the standard = around 50%.

There was an R200 path but according to carmack the performance gained vs the ARB2 path wasn't worth the IQ hit on the R300, and that is why the R300 always ran with ARB2.


I would say that it was almost criminal to leave as the standard path one that had terrible performance on both hardwares, but still ATi should have been more proactive with their developer support programs.

 

[pxc]

I had a 9800Pro and picked up Doom 3 when it came out - never had a problem. It's interesting reading all about this now, I had no idea.

I had a FX 5950 NU when I played Doom 3. One weird thing I kept reading about is how dark the game was and how the player couldn't see anything. There maps were certainly dark, but it wasn't black. I never understood it until I upgraded to a 9800 Pro. It was darker on that card with the dark shadows completely black.

There was so much drama over Doom 3. Some tears. Then we all hugged it out. (the last one never happened)

 

[Dan_D]

Well i found what Carmack said at the time of Doom3 about R300 vs NV30, found it in a forum and since it was a huge wall of text i will just copy the link to it:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=3149

In the end it boiled down to "when both cards played with the standard ARB2 path, R300 > NV30, but when NV30 ran it's personalized NV30 path, NV30>R300", and the performance hit for the NV30 to go from the personalized path to the standard = around 50%.

There was an R200 path but according to carmack the performance gained vs the ARB2 path wasn't worth the IQ hit on the R300, and that is why the R300 always ran with ARB2.


I would say that it was almost criminal to leave as the standard path one that had terrible performance on both hardwares, but still ATi should have been more proactive with their developer support programs.

It's such an old issue that the details on it were fuzzy in my mind at best. Though I remembered something about the driver pathing. Yeah, id could have made better choices but ATi's OpenGL drivers were a travesty back then and nothing id could have done would have changed that.