ATI Drivers Geared For Quake 3?

alrz1 writes: "HardOCP has posted an article wherein they accuse ATI of writing drivers that are optimized for Quake 3, just Quake 3, and only Quake 3. Apparently, using a program called quackifier, which modifies the Quake3 executable by changing every "Quake" reference to "Quack" and then creating a new executable called "Quack3", they have demonstrated to some extent that the Quack3.exe benchmarks are around 15% slower than with the original Quake3.exe (same box, os, drivers, etc). The slant seems to be that there is something inherently wrong about writing game-specific optimizations into drivers, if in fact this is what ATI has done. I think this is perfectly acceptable: Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows, and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?"

Wha??

[FortKnox]

Seeing that CounterStrike [counter-strike.net] has the largest online community, killing both Q3 and UT communities, and that quality mods [flfmod.com] are still coming out of Halflife, wouldn't it be smarter to target the bigger audience??

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

pick your battles, slashdot

[perdida]

There's no problem with writing version-optimized drivers.

The update or improvement of such software is probably intended, first, for the new Quake buyers. It's a company that occasionally serves a fan base, it's not enslaved to the fan base that has all previous versions.

It's like a new model of a car with a beautiful v-8 engine that previous models have always used. If the new model is configured to optimize engine performance, it's not discrimination against collectors of previous models.

Re:I'd have to say yes...

[general_re]

Normally I'd agree with you, but that's because in many cases, vendors seem to tune their drivers for the benchmarks at the expense of everything else - Q3A scores go up, but real-world performance suffers. If they've figured out some way to boost Q3A performance without having some performance trade-off somewhere (and they aren't spending so much time on Quake tweaking that their drivers lag in other areas), then I say it's fair game....

Re:The right way?

[InfinityWpi]

Simple.

Because that would require actual work.

Knowing the coding community as we do, which is more likely: this was written by work-obsessed coders who want to make the best drivers possible, or written by a handful of people who are pissed at management and just want ot make it -look- faster so they can get more money for the least ammount of effort, go home, and be with their families?

Re:Most reviews don't use CounterStrike for benchm

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'll just buy reputable parts (athlon 4 or XP(original works well too), geforce 2 or 3, good stuff like that)

Athlon -- Reviewers exclaim superior performance from certain AMD motherboards that turned out to be too unstable to be used as regular production machines.

GeForce -- Reviewers exclaim wonderful game benchmarks, never mention that the 2D quality makes your desktop look as bad as with the Cirrus Logic card you had in 1994.

I agree that the review business (including Tom's and other web sites) is cracked, but to a very large degree, the community recommendations are based on the reviews and are also cracked. End result -- No good information.

That wacky ATI...

[MsGeek]

One thing not mentioned here is that ATI currently has the best hardware acceleration for DVD out there. NVidia can't even do it. In order to get hardware DVD acceleration on NVidia products, you need an add-on device that plugs in the back of all of their Geforce cards. Also ATI right now is making decent, sane video cards that work in both Windows and Linux for pretty cheap prices compared to the prices for the same thing with an NVidia label.

If it wasn't for that goddamn ad ATI ran in Computer Shopper this month (S&M sells, bay-bee!) I would be very enthusiastically defending them. Right now, I am more likely to spend the extra bucks and grab a Matrox because the idea of using an image of violence against women to sell video cards is repugnant to me.

Oh yeah, I buy my DVDs used, too.

Game optimizations aren't new people

[TerryMathews]

Anyone remember the Voodoo2's miniGL that was designed from the ground up for Quake2? What's the difference here? We aren't talking about benchmark tampering; they've found a way to optimize their drivers to make Quake3 run faster. Maybe there are geometric instructions that Q3 doesn't make use of that they disable? That would be a good reason for the optimization by executable name; it might not work on other games. Let's not cruxify ATi just yet; they haven't done anything wrong as far as I can tell...