Carmack on the graphics war

Julio Franco · Jan 30, 2003

Long time since we saw one of these. John Carmack, head programmer at id software, has always got something interesting to say about the present and future of 3d chips, this time he discusses and compares the GeForceFX and ATI's R300.

Things seem well balanced at this time and perhaps will continue like this unless one of the two companies pull some really improved drivers (more likely: NVIDIA) or get some prices cut on place (more likely: ATI)...

At the moment, the NV30 is slightly faster on most scenes in Doom than the R300, but I can still find some scenes where the R300 pulls a little bit ahead. The issue is complicated because of the different ways the cards can choose to run the game.

MrGaribaldi · Jan 30, 2003

By JC:
The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but
only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality
improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path.
Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an
exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks
twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.

iss · Jan 30, 2003

seems like everyone is commenting on the noise of the FX. even carmack chimes in with.

I'm not usually one to care about fan noise, but the NV30 does annoy me.

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Carmack on the graphics war

Julio Franco TechSpot Editor

MrGaribaldi TechSpot Ambassador

iss TechSpot Chancellor