Why cant they just get along?

[mayro]

If you go over to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17552 this article re inforces the fact that as customers of a war we have to choose sides. I wish it where not the case....

What i dont understand is why developers of video games are selling them selvs short just to make a quick buck. Take Valve and ATI and ID and Nvidia for example. This shit is just childish and needs to change. Yes its great that you support a game and its great that your new hardware will work well with it. What these companys are failing to relize is that EVEN IF YOUR GAME WAS DESIGNED TO PLAY WITH A GEFORCE IT DAMN WELL BETTER WORK ON THE COMPETITORS CARD TOO.

Its really come down to this argument. Ati's 3dc looks very nice although ID will not put it in their FRIKIN game becuase it would give a advantage to ATI cards and the game is a MENT TO BE PLAYED game.

As for Half-Life 2 i dont see this as being as much of a issue becuase even though im sure ATI would just love to cram Half life 2 bench marks down nvidia's gullet, I can say with confidance that the new line of cards are almost equal in performance. Why you are asking? Becuase A: Valve relises that their are 2 types of people that are going to player their games. People with and without radeon cards. They are makeing the game to the best of their ability to support all new features of video card manufacturers.

ATI and Nvidia need to get their crap said and done becuase what is happening is they end up screwing over their customers. They endorse support what ever you want to call it to the big winner games and try their damnedest to make sure that the game will run better on their brand of card. ID needs to do something and ATI need to get off their bum too and try and fix this crap. Yes the 9800pro can get around 30FPS at 1024x768 on high but have you seen its LOWS? When does its lows comeinto play? This shouldnt be a question we need to ask....

Its sickining to the fact that one day we may literaly have to awnser a friend someday with "i forgot to bring my nvidia card so i cant play that game for shiz".

WAKE UP GAME DEVELOPERS, SUPPORT YOUR COMMUNITY AND NOT YOUR POCKETBOOK!

 

[ShadowFox]

You're off base here.

id is partnered with NVidia because NVidia gives the best performance. This isn't id's fault as ATi has simply ignored the OpenGL platform.

Valve chose to align with ATi since the FX line was horrid with Shaders.

 

[mayro]

Right but if ID where to add 3dc support to their game then it would make it much easyer for the ATI cards "newer ones" to catch back up to the point of better frame rates.

 

[ShadowFox]

What is this 3dc you are referring to?

 

[mayro]

3dc.. 3Dc™
3Dc is an exciting new compression technology designed to bring out fine details in games while minimizing memory usage. It is the first compression technique optimized to work with normal maps, which allow fine per-pixel control over how light reflects from a textured surface. With up to 4:1 compression possible, this means game designers can now include up to 4x the detail without changing the amount of graphics memory required and without impacting performance.

leme get some pics... their is really a big differance.

 

[ComradeBadger]

They don't have to use it if they don't want to..

 

[mayro]

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040504/images/3dc-compare.jpg

I cant find the really good one i saw the other day. It was ither serious sam 2 or tribes pics i was looking at but their where 2 monster looking things standing side by side one had a ati vest on and holding a foot ball and it looked so much better than the one it was standing by. If you find that pic anyone post it cus id like to set that as my desktop.

 

[Mac]

from what I understand, Carmack is a big openGL fan, and Nvidia cards just happen to run OpenGL much better than ati cards which are more optimized for direct x.

am I right?

 

[mayro]

But doom 3 also supports nvidias special form of shadeing or what ever. "not the 3.o"

 

[Asus]

Can't link directly from Tommy boy's site. He don't like that.

Yeah, you are off base.
Nvidia made their card (NV30/40) with D3 and multiple lights in mind, Ultrashadow 1/2 etc. They had access to the game and knew what technology was going to be in it. They included it in shipping hardware before D3 had been released, plus the game then got delayed.

So far OpenGL games have had very high FPS and it has not been on AIT's priority list. Doom3 is capped at 60FPS and will run great on any of those systems. I don't see the issue here.
Do you know how to implement 3Dc? It is done differently for DX9 and OpenGL.
It uses FourCC code while OpenGL uses vendor-specific extensions. Developers shouldn't be blamed if they don't adopt it. lol

 

[dscowboy]

Re: 3Dc, id wrote their own normal map compression algorthim for ATI cards, and a seperate one for nVidia cards. Enabling 3Dc wouldn't help ATI with D3 much, ATI's problem is they went balls-out on DirectX and forgot/ignored OpenGL for so many years, now it's catching up to them. They've always had OpenGL performance issues, it has nothing to do with id.

Valve is in a lot worse situation than id right now. When they thought HL2 was going to be released, nVidia's FX was getting creamed by ATI in DX9 performance. Now that HL2 is delayed a year and the 6800 series is clearly superior to anything ATI has, Valve is either going to look stupid promoting ATI when there's no significant performance advantage, or going to look like sellouts if ATI magically does much better in HL2 when they've been tied or worse than nVidia in all other DX9 benchmarks.

 

[Axyon]

Now that HL2 is delayed a year and the 6800 series is clearly superior to anything ATI has...

Allow me to stop you there. You seriously cannot say that, the x800 line of cards are great competitors to the 6800s (and let's not mention that the x800 XT-PE has continually beaten the 6800u in most benchmarks released. Whoops, I did mention it. Oh well.)

 

[^Ben]

5FPS difference OMGWTFBBQH4X!!!!

 

[Asus]

Well, ATI's opengl drivers didn't have 'issues'. They delivered great FPS (above 100+) and needed no improvement until Doom3 came along. Nvidia sells a lot of workstation cards so they were constantly improving their OpenGL drivers, not because the games needed them.

Doom 3 is the first game where that difference could matter but since it's capped at 60FPS it is greatly minimized. It works great on any high-end card. Only if you like to turn up the AA/AF would you want a 6800 for D3. But the funny thing is, if you are really into AA/AF then you would have bought a X800 for the rest of the games out there. lol

Nvidia surely doesn't have a card that is better than anything ATI has. They are more or less tied except in the individual games you perfer (DX games for me). ATI has a strong advantage in heavy DX9 games, like Tomb Raider. Almost a 20FPS difference there.
There will be a performance difference between Nvidia and ATI cards but by far not as great as it was with the FX series.

 

[NJD2003]

Atleast ATi is now actually rewriting their OpenGL code, but it won't be finished for 2 to 3 months.

 

[blahblahblah]

Don't forget that ID is already use 2 normal map compression techniques. One for Nvidia Cards and one for ATI cards. ATI actually worked with ID software to develop a normal map compression technique besides 3Dc.

One thing of note on the normal map compression is that generally speaking if you DXT a normal map you get really crappy results. NVIDIA hardware supports palettized compression which yields good compression and normal maps retain hard and round edges really well. Unfortunately this compression does a poor job in other cases and you end up getting splotchy areas. ATI does not support the palettized compression so we needed a better solution. ATI had done some research on various methods of normal map compression and we ended swapping the red and alpha ( which is zero in the case of a normal map ) channels. This effectively allows the compression to do a much better job and is just one extra instruction in the fragment program to move the alpha channel into the red channel. The bottom line on what happens on each card is as follows.

 

[^Ben]

They will never only make it work on 1 card because usually half of the developers customer base has a different card.