Doom 3 vs. Half Life 2: Regardless of Which is Better, We All Lose.

[Gorgon]

Joel Hruska from sudhian.com wrote an article about gaming today, and expresses his concerns about the possible future of gaming. While most of you guys will say "Joel who?", his views are interesting and the article is well worth a read:

In this case its not even Doom 3 or Half Life 2 themselves that's the problem so much as what'll happen if the game industry picks up on the benefit of this type of partnership. Too much focus on one manufacturer (or simply walking too close to that line) can lead to problems for both. Given the delays, the coupon embarassments, and the further delays, I'm betting some at ATI wish they hadn't touched HL2 with a ten foot pole. But then again, with NVIDIA backing Doom 3, ATi needed SOMETHING. Wanna take bets on who gets Quake 4 or Unreal Tournament 2005? Hopefully no one. This type of fragmentation doesn’t help consumers, the designers, or the industry. In the long run, it might not even help NVIDIA or ATI.


/me find this article so interesting. :thumbs:

http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=581

 

[Lobster]

How did we get from spacewar to this, 90% of people who play games dont give a crap anyway.

 

[Xrenity]

who cares.
As long as I can play all games I like to play (with my ATI) I don't care.
(Must confess I do like it HL2 is 'made' for the r9800)

 

[KagePrototype]

Heh, apathy. Gotta love it.

 

[razorblade kiss]

Truth is it does help consumers. If a player wants to get the best experience out of the game hes playing. He'll know what card to go with. It's like Ford vs Chevy, one does one thing, and the other does something else, but people buy Chevy and Ford like the world is gonna end tomorrow.

 

[lotusandy]

Heh, apathy. Gotta love it.

I was about to write a long post about apathy, and how damaging it is but..

meh, I can't be bothered...

 

[ne-waller]

no sane game manufacturer is going to cut off half of their market.
game manufacturers want their games to look the best, and if they can achieve this goal easier by working with one of the graphics card manufacturers then they will.
the games are made for the market, it would be a fools game for a developer to get involved in the war within a separate (allbeit linked) industry

and if you thought the petitions for sam and max were a big deal, imagine if Quake 4 was nvidia only.

 

[Razor]

Gorgon, i can understand the point if Id or Valve had sabotaged the game for the other graphics card company, but they didn't.

Id had to cope with the "poor" performance of Ati's cards in Opengl and Valve had to cope with the "poor" performance of Nvidia's Nv3x range of cards in Halflife2.

The article has no basis in fact at all and the person is making wild assumptions that graphics cards companies are paying off the developers to sabotage the game for other hardware manufacturer, this is not the case. What is happening though is that Nvidia are encouraging developers to pursue the technology on their cards and Ati are doing the same;

The developers are happy as they get a monetary injection and help with programing the graphics engine side of the game.
The graphics card companies are happy because they get games that are guarenteed to support the features that only appear on their cards.
The consumers are happy as they get a great game that performs great on as much hardware as possible, and games that are guarenteed to take advantage of their latest hardware that they have just spent £400 straight away, and not waiting 2 years for the support to dribble through.

 

[CyberSh33p]

very interesting read, though he seems a little bit biased against ATI. One can already answer the Unreal Tournament thing though... obviously NVidia since they're pretty much in bed with em already.

and I wouldn't doubt that carmack did some sort of optimization for nvidia, in one way or another, its like optimizing for an OS. sure, you'd like it to work everywhere, but the best effects can only come if you go individual. and twice the work by optimizing for both isn't realistic.

valve said already that they went with ATI only after seeing they pwned nvidia anyway.

when was this written btw? benchmarks have been released with CS:S in one form or another.

 

[SMT]

Meh, it's your classic Sudhian rant: dogmatic and alarmist.

 

[nutcrackr]

Interesting read but I am not sure if this guy is seeing the other side of things. HL2 delays constantly would make ATI regret the partnership? I doubt it, it just means a longer period of time they can bundle coupons with their cards. ATI can still sell the cards for HL2 and promote the crap out of it, and with Gabe giving us a new release date every month gamers believe it will be released soon. The gamers lose out of this delay not ATI or Valve.

 

[^Ben]

No facts whatsoever.

The engine was done last september(or was it the september before?) it was the actual game media that needed to completed.

Valve are the baddd guys wahhh wahhh the liers, awhhh wahhhh.

 

[razorblade kiss]

Why does everyone say "meh"? Is this the cs elite talkers all grown up or something? I've never in my life mumbled, or said "meh". Someone fill me in here.

 

[Brian Damage]

It's just something like "Bah!" or "Eh?"...

 

[Absinthe]

Meh

10charlimit

 

[subtlesnake]

Valve are the baddd guys wahhh wahhh the liers, awhhh wahhhh.

Whether you want to except it or not, Valve had to be lying when they said that "Half-Life 2 is still on for a September 30th ship" at ECTS 1 month before.

 

[^Ben]

No,

Ask yourself why would they say it, if they knew that the game wouldnt make it?

 

[subtlesnake]

I've asked that question myself many times and the only reason I can think of is to sell more ATI hardware, as horribly cynical as that sounds.

I mean come on, the game has been delayed a year, and was only playable all the way through in april/may. Are you telling me they expected to get several months work done in a single month? And why did Gabe say "no comment" when asked for the realease date?

 

[ZombieBudgie]

No,

Ask yourself why would they say it, if they knew that the game wouldnt make it?

Exactly, going back on their word can only estrange fans, and they know that.

 

[Lazlow]

I find it interesting that the author puts so much responsibility on game developers in the conspiracy of card-specific optimizations. PC game developers write to an SDK - say, dX 9.0c. That SDK offers well-documented capabilities, and the problem is that video card manufacturers simply don't support all those capabilities, or support some of them poorly.

So a developer has to make choices - do you write to the least common denominator across all cards so the game runs exactly the same for every consumer... and looks pretty crappy as a result? Or do you write the best graphics engine that you can, and then attempt to provide fallbacks for cards that can't quite handle the engine? Most companies opt for the latter.

In my last major project, the team spent months writing fallbacks to allow both NVidia and ATI cards run as good as possible. There were still differences in the end, but there was certainly no intentional bias involved.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

It was like the berlin wall, but in the end, they unite to form a much more bigger company. So, I'm starting a rumour, that both companies will merger by the beginning of 2006

 

[wonkers]

I don't think that brand loyalty or bundles will change the industry. What bothers me a lot more is that people will whine and complain that one *BLEEDING EDGE* card gets about 4 Fps better than the next *BLEEDING EDGE* card!

I mean come on. Ever since video cards became a gaming enhancer they have had games that would run better on certain hardware. It's when people only buy a certain card because it gets 4 Fps better on a certain game that the industry takes a nose-dive.

If your game runs smooth, SMILE. Be glad you can afford to keep that overclocked P4 2.8 Ghz 9800 XT MONSTER up to date year after year.

 

[muka3d]

I enjoyed that article, really gets you thinking...

 

[Sean]

I have a Radeon 9600XT. Doom 3 runs just fine on my computer. A friend of mine has a brand new GeForce. CS: Source runs just fine on his computer.

Beyond that, who cares? Why would you spend $500 on something just because Valve or Id tells you too?

 

[AlaskanStewie]

You have to do what they say...

Reminds me of that one family guy episode with the mintos commercial with Jon Wilks Booth =]

 

[M1RAG3]

I find it interesting that the author puts so much responsibility on game developers in the conspiracy of card-specific optimizations. PC game developers write to an SDK - say, dX 9.0c. That SDK offers well-documented capabilities, and the problem is that video card manufacturers simply don't support all those capabilities, or support some of them poorly.QUOTE]

Exactly, such as the current battle between ATI and Nvidia regarding SM 3.0 (Shader Model 3.0, a new aspect of DX 9.0c which allows for a hige increase in number of operations per pass and the addition of Parallax Mapping)

On a side note, let's not forget that HL2 is being made to be able to fallback to DX 7 cards, allowing for a huge range of consumer cards.