Quake3 - Why did ID fully support SIMD and not 3DNow? Grrrr :(

rockhard

Golden Member
Nov 7, 1999
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Just been playin around in Quake3 with my new system in my sig :)
I used to have a Intel P3 based rig so now ive gone AMD would like to see 3DNow fully optimized in Quake3 like the SIMD extensions are.

Why would ID do the pooper scoop on AMD gamers when AMD based rigs are taking more of a share of the gaming market?
Does anyone know if AMD themselves are goin to do a patch for Quake3 like they did with Quake2? The Quake2 one works a treat :D

rockhard =)
 

jmcoreymv

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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I wouldnt say amd base rigs are anywhere near the majority of the gaming market, just the anandtech market.
 

dawks

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Oct 9, 1999
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Intel pushes very hard to get support for their chips. AMD does not try quite as hard.
 

EMAN

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Jan 28, 2000
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Quake 3 was made before athlons. No body wants to play quake 3 with amd k6 2 or 3 systems.
 

Soccerman

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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I was thinking they didn't support 3DNow too, but others say that it does.. I still don't quite believe them, becuase I think the K6-2 should be able to hit higher FPS then it does (really, how many more polygons does it have compared to Q2?)
 

rockhard

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Nov 7, 1999
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Seems strange that ive seen it mentioned many times that P3 processors are approx 10% faster than T-birds in Quake3?
Cant say ive noticed myself.
If this is the case then with the T-bird havin better FPU, memory bandwidth, EV6 bus etc, then surely it would more likely be the other way round but to a lesser degree, yeah?
 

2dfx

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Sep 3, 2000
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It doesn't really matter that much because at high resolutions and 32bit colour its limited by the video card.

Anyway, I heard some people were making 3dnow optimised DLLs, like the q2 ones for q3.
 

BurntKooshie

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Just to make a correction: You meant to say SSE, and not 3Dnow!. SSE is intels FPU (and some integer additions too) SIMD instructions, just like MMX was their integer (only integer) SIMD. 3dnow is FPU SIMD, but their were additions in the athlon, and the K6-X+'s which included integer stuff like prefetch.

Q3 has 3dnow support in audio only from what I have heard (at jc-news). This means that the support is only marginal.

One possible reason - Which CPU is more proliferant? ones with SSE, or 3dnow? Right now, its still intel's SSE, but then again, a large number of these are in the corporate world....

So the real answer? I dunno, maybe something to ask Carmack himself.
 

Soccerman

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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"It doesn't really matter that much because at high resolutions and 32bit colour its limited by the video card."

IT DOES TO ME! anything I can get out of this computer is a plus.

I can't believe they didn't add support..
 

rockhard

Golden Member
Nov 7, 1999
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thanx BurntKooshie

With all these abreviations for techie terms floatin in my head kinda get mixed up.

Hope u got the jist of it tho' ;)

How does SSE vs 3DNow! sound?
Heh, think i got this licked now :D
 

Mday

Lifer
Oct 14, 1999
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3dnow is OLDER than SSE.

in fact, 3dnow has been around since the k6-2 days, which was before p3.
 

dawks

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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How does SSE vs 3DNow! sound?
They dont have any direct effect on sound. They would only speed it up, so more CPU time can go to other tasks. SSE, or 3DNow! would only be needed in A3D really.

All SSE or 3DNow! does, it speed up complex math (multiplication).
 

pac1085

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Jun 27, 2000
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whats funny is...on the ID tour bus when quake 3 was first coming out, they were using all AMD Athlon systems, and the game was made on sgi systems, intel probly bribed them :)
 

BurntKooshie

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Oct 9, 1999
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<< All SSE or 3DNow! does, it speed up complex math (multiplication). >>

Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't sound processing fit into this category?
 

dawks

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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It would in situations like A3D where a TON of FPU math is done.. but not like audio processing..

3DNow on Athlons has a few new instructions of the K6 series, for example, one that is dedicated to .mp3 processing. MP3 decoding involves floating point math mostly (i think) so it speeds up that. But not the mixing part, just the file decoding.
 

BenSkywalker

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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&quot;really, how many more polygons does it have compared to Q2?&quot;

A it over 400% more give or take. The average Quake2 screen had about 3K polys, the average Quake3 has about 13K polys.
 

unclebud

Diamond Member
Jun 13, 2000
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excuse me? i'm playing quake 3 with a k6-2 350 with a riva 128, 128mb, and i get 23 fps. not fantastic, but it's enuff. not everybody's a rich baby with deep pockets
edit: thats why i bought q3, they listed riva 128 on the box and it's playable, they deserved my money when all these other cos are chasing tech
 

Cosmic_Horror

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Oct 10, 1999
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Intel cpu's have market share and still have brand name recognition. Unfortunately SSE is much greatly supported than 3dnow!. With the athlon/duron cpu's (with there more power fpu) the gap between amd and intel cpu in gaming preformace has closed quite considerably. Lets face an Athlon/duron system will give excelent gaming preformace regardless of SIMD optimsation or not.
 

Warrenton

Banned
Aug 7, 2000
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Because A) Intel puts out a compiler for SSE. B) AMD makes the developer do the optimizations themselves.
 

EMAN

Banned
Jan 28, 2000
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Quake 3 is an online game right? Why would you play with only 23 fps? I know I couldn't play competing with the best that's for sure...
 

Weyoun

Senior member
Aug 7, 2000
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damn warrenton, beat me to it, i was scrolling down just itching to reply and what do you do? :p

yes, intel provides compilers to optimise any program for sse, developers do none of the work. I dont know if this is true for AMD also, but i KNOW it is for intel, explaination in a nutshell :)
 

Chuck

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Oct 9, 1999
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Like others have said I think it's just that Intel 'p1mps' SSE far more. I went to beta test Black and White a while back, and I was talking to the programmers about how they were going to support each one, and they said that Intel sent round one of their techie guys to reprogram all their complex maths functions to use SSE (for free)!! I don't think AMD does anything like that!

BurntKooshie,

Audio isn't that hard (processor wise). All you are doing is sending a wav file to the Direct Sound buffer. Can't really optimise that any more. Besides in Quake 3 id use the secondary sound buffer (it was listed as 'max compatability' in Q2), rather than the faster primary sound buffer (they did have it in Q2). So from that you can conclude that they are not too woried about the performance of sound.
 

Hawkeye_(BEL)

Banned
Dec 24, 1999
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I don't know where I read it, but Compaq recently released a 3Dnow optimized version of their compilers. That's one step in the right direction IMO.

I can understand why AMD doesn't provide an optimized compiler themselves. Hey, they are a small company compared to Intel. Intel can spare much manpower for building a compiler, AMD can't :(
 

Remedy

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 1999
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You ppl better hope tribes2 and halo have 3Dnow! support because that game looks like it's going to give our current systems capital punishment for frames persecond.