Don't buy Parhelia for Doom3

[BokChoy]

http://www.tomshardware.com/business/02q3/020817/quakecon-06.html

Doom III will feature six custom back ends to take advantage of the specific features of the video cards. Currently this will only apply to cards from ATI, NVidia, and 3D Labs. Maybe at some point we might do something with Matrox and SIS cards, but for the moment that has not been determined. The Matrox and SIS cards will be able to run the game, but because of the lack of a custom back end, we will not be able to take advantage of the special specific feature of these cards.

[P5ycho]

That definately means Creative is coming with more gaming oriented P10 based boards....

[TdB]

so we matroxusers might not get fragmentshader enhanced per-pixel-lightning.

opengl is a big mess rigth now, because there isn´t an opengl standard for fragmentshaders, thus alot of card-specific extensions is the only way to use fragmentshaders.

I can understand why carmack won´t make a back-end for each and every gpu out there, but it is sad that he ditches matrox because of it.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Might be because Matrox is unwilling to give him low level chip specs (registers, that kinda stuff).

[TdB]

I don´t think he needs that, I think he uses the fragmentshader extension, which is card-specific.

[[GDI]Raptor]

Its very easy to se that carmack isn't a very big Matrox fan. Looks like an nVidiot to me....

Q - What about the new 3D Labs video cards?

A - From what I have seen so far the new 3D Labs cards are not going to be competitive with the highest end video cards. The card has good drivers however and the virtual texture mapper is good and I think other companies will adopt this. I don't think that it will be a card that will be adopted by consumers.

http://www.tomshardware.com/business/02q3/020817/quakecon-07.html

Looks like the 3DLabs card won't be so fast that many pepole have belived!

[Greebe]

How about greasing anothers pocket so he doesn't develop what is needed for D3 to work with Matrox/S3 cards.

He's already been greatly mistaken about some of Parhelia's capabilities, so that proves he is not the GOD like Entity that many think he is... and $$$ well there are rumours...

[Dr Mordrid]

No suprise there. Payola has a long tradition in media companies...why should gaming companies be any different?

Personally I think his thrust is that they don't want to support DM and DAT in favor of the traditional culling engines. He may well live to regret that if other game coders decide to use them in DX9 games. His stuff could well end playing like its up to its knees in mud by comparison....

Dr. Mordrid

[thop]

more info from carmack:

The generic back end does not use vertex programs, or provide specular highlights, so the custom back ends provide both performance and quality improvements.

There are some borderline cases that may or may not get custom coding -- Radeon R100, Matrox Parhelia, and SiS Xabre are all currently using the default path, but could benefit from additional custom coding. I will only consider that when they have absolutely rock solid quality on the default path, and if it looks like they have enough performance headroom to bother with the specular passes.

The NV20 back end has more work in it than any other, with two different cases for the lighting interaction, but on the X-Box I would probably create additional special cases to optimize some of the other possible permutations.

[Greebe]

slurp slurp slurp

[leech]

First off, Carmack is human, which means he has human faults. Greed, Miserly, etc. Let's look at the fact that he's one guy, who obviously has to have others to create music and art, etc. for the game. And aslo look at the fact that Xbox is owned my microsoft, nVidia's chipset is in Xbox, so of course Carmack being paid by MS/nVidia will want to program every special little thing for them first.

And also, would anyone actually buy the Parhelia JUST for Doom3? Honestly, how many people actually will buy a videocard based solely on wether or not it runs ONE game well. Sadly, I know there are a few. (Personally I upgraded to the Parhelia 'cause I was sick of ATi's crappy drivers and I missed the 2D quality) And usually the only time I upgrade my processor speed/Ram is when there is a New game for Mame that I want to play that runs too slowly on my computer. (Kind of odd, isn't it? the reason to upgrade is not for the fancy new games coming out, but for ones that came out years ago!) So far I don't think I even care about wether or not Doom3 will have all the special things on the Parhelia, I want Unreal 2!

As far as the special extensions themselves go, Carmack may be kind of right. I think the Parhelia needs a lot more optimizations and extensions finished for the OpenGL (perhaps part of the reason NWN crashes all the time, though I think that's Bioware's fault in at least a BIG part.) Well, I've ranted enough...

Leech

[Dogbert]

Originally posted by leech

Honestly, how many people actually will buy a videocard based solely on wether or not it runs ONE game well. Sadly, I know there are a few.

More than you'd think. This is how / why nvidia became so big in the first place.

[leech]

Originally posted by Dogbert


More than you'd think. This is how / why nvidia became so big in the first place.

Oh wait, that's right, we're talking about the world where a psycho like Hitler could get into power (or more modern Osama bin Laden) God, people are idiots.

Well, another reason nVidia became so big is after the downfall of 3dfx they swarmed in and grabbed all of their stuff. For the most part I think the nVidia chipsets really stunk before that. Could explain why it's taken them so long to get decent 2d, 'cause the original Voodoo's only did 3d, remember the Banshee cards? 2d/3d, but they sucked too.

Leech

[Jutai]

I think Matrox should do it themselves... After reading the article on Gamespy for Quakecon, it looks like they made the game really easy to modify. If Carmack don't wanna do it Matrox should. Everyone knows this wil be the game to have when it comes out and Matrox could really do well I feel by actually taking the time to write up a modification to take advantage of their new features. Make the Parhelia owners proud of their investment with cool eye candy and show developers the power of the chip. really as much as we might not want to admit Quake 3 was the defacto game, (almost) everyone looks at the quake 3 performance of all the GPU's out there and they will look to Doom 3 as the next standard. It will take time and money out of Matrox' pocket but I say it is well worth it for current P owners, prospective P owners an P developers. They made the optimizations for quake 3 and a few others with the G400 I think this would yield an even better affect.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Dogbert


More than you'd think. This is how / why nvidia became so big in the first place.

nVidia? Hell, try 3Dfx. Voodoo + glQuake = pretty much how consumer cards got to this place.