John C comments
Here is the skinny of his posts:
"The standard lighting model in DOOM, with all features enabled, but no custom shaders, takes five passes on a GF1/2 or Radeon, either two or three passes on a GF3, and should be possible in a clear + single pass on ATI's new part.
It is still unclear how the total performance picture will look.
Lots of pixels are still rendered with no textures at all (stencil shadows), or only a single texture (blended effects), so the pass advantage will only show up on some subset of all the drawing.
If ATI doesn't do as good of a job with the memory interface, or doesn't get the clock rate up as high as NVidia, they will still lose.
The pixel operations are a step more flexible than Nvidia's current options, but it is still clearly not where things are going to be going soon in terms of generality.
Developers are just going to need to sweat out the diversity or go for a least common denominator for the next couple years.
I fully expect the next generation engine after the current DOOM engine will be targeted at the properly general purpose graphics processors that I have been pushing towards over the last several years.
Hardware vendors are sort of reticent to give up being able to "out feature" the opposition, but the arguments for the final flexibility steps are too strong to ignore.
John Carmack"
and
"Obviously, any game done with the new Doom engine is going to run slower than a game done with Q3 technology. You can make some of it back up by going to the simpler lighting model and running at a lower resolution, but you just won't be able to hit 60+ fps on a GF2. The low end of our supported platforms will be a GF1 / 64 bit GF2Go / Radeon, and it is expected to chug a bit there, even with everything cut down.
There are several more Q3 engine games in the works that will continue to run great on existing systems, and Doom is still a long ways off in any case, so there will be a lot more upgrades and new systems. We are aiming to have a GF3 run Doom with all features enabled at 30 fps. We expect the high end cards at the time of release to run it at 60+ fps with improved quality. This is an intentionally lower average FPS for the hardware cross section than we targeted for Q3, but still higher than we targeted Q2 and earlier games (before hardware acceleration was prevalent).
In the GLQuake days, light maps were considered an extravagance ("Render the entire screen TWICE? Are you MAD?"😉, and some unfortunate hardware companies just thought increased performance meant higher resolutions and more triangles instead of more complex pixel operations. Five passes sounds like a lot right now, but it will be just as quaint as dual texturing in the near future. I am quite looking forward to 100+ operations per interaction in future work.
John Carmack "
Well wow. I hope Johny C can force everything to a commond hardware desing. It may cut down the developement Cycle.
Also Ben Skywalker, you ask to see where Johny C said 30 FPS in doom3, here ya go 🙂
Here is the skinny of his posts:
"The standard lighting model in DOOM, with all features enabled, but no custom shaders, takes five passes on a GF1/2 or Radeon, either two or three passes on a GF3, and should be possible in a clear + single pass on ATI's new part.
It is still unclear how the total performance picture will look.
Lots of pixels are still rendered with no textures at all (stencil shadows), or only a single texture (blended effects), so the pass advantage will only show up on some subset of all the drawing.
If ATI doesn't do as good of a job with the memory interface, or doesn't get the clock rate up as high as NVidia, they will still lose.
The pixel operations are a step more flexible than Nvidia's current options, but it is still clearly not where things are going to be going soon in terms of generality.
Developers are just going to need to sweat out the diversity or go for a least common denominator for the next couple years.
I fully expect the next generation engine after the current DOOM engine will be targeted at the properly general purpose graphics processors that I have been pushing towards over the last several years.
Hardware vendors are sort of reticent to give up being able to "out feature" the opposition, but the arguments for the final flexibility steps are too strong to ignore.
John Carmack"
and
"Obviously, any game done with the new Doom engine is going to run slower than a game done with Q3 technology. You can make some of it back up by going to the simpler lighting model and running at a lower resolution, but you just won't be able to hit 60+ fps on a GF2. The low end of our supported platforms will be a GF1 / 64 bit GF2Go / Radeon, and it is expected to chug a bit there, even with everything cut down.
There are several more Q3 engine games in the works that will continue to run great on existing systems, and Doom is still a long ways off in any case, so there will be a lot more upgrades and new systems. We are aiming to have a GF3 run Doom with all features enabled at 30 fps. We expect the high end cards at the time of release to run it at 60+ fps with improved quality. This is an intentionally lower average FPS for the hardware cross section than we targeted for Q3, but still higher than we targeted Q2 and earlier games (before hardware acceleration was prevalent).
In the GLQuake days, light maps were considered an extravagance ("Render the entire screen TWICE? Are you MAD?"😉, and some unfortunate hardware companies just thought increased performance meant higher resolutions and more triangles instead of more complex pixel operations. Five passes sounds like a lot right now, but it will be just as quaint as dual texturing in the near future. I am quite looking forward to 100+ operations per interaction in future work.
John Carmack "
Well wow. I hope Johny C can force everything to a commond hardware desing. It may cut down the developement Cycle.
Also Ben Skywalker, you ask to see where Johny C said 30 FPS in doom3, here ya go 🙂
