So does the leaked Doom 3 Alpha work good on the G400?

[CaineTanathos]

damn I have an intel chipset

[DGhost]

installed the latest intel drivers installed?

[CaineTanathos]

yeap,

tried also changin the agp speed, texture memory, sideband adressing etc, nothing helped

[ElDonAntonio]

Originally posted by Rukes


I guess the truth scares some people then?

He's a gifted programmer, and makes unbiased opinions. I love my Parhelia, dojnt get me wrong, but im not going to start blaming him for showing the truth.

Did you expect Matrox to make a god of a chip and him go to "Oh wow, its the best ever, everyone buy it!"

Carmack was dead wrong on a good part of his comments regarding the Parhelia (you can read about it here on MURC btw). I highly doubt he's unbiased, and regarding his 'gift' as a programmer, I think the guy is WAYYYY overhyped. The people that tend to get all the fame are generally not the most talented, but the best marketers. Look at Steve Gibson for another example.

[Wombat]

No, I think JC really is that good. His code is pretty tight. He's even taken a passing glance at Matrox drivers and given fixes back.

[K6-III]

And don't forget that he isn't only good at programming: www.armadilloaerospace.com

[DGhost]

yeah, you go read some of JC's source code (even quake1, if you keep in mind the hardware it ran on) and see how much of it 1) you can figure out, and 2) is pretty damn tight...

he has looked at the Matrox hardware and like he said, the drivers have problems. his comments are for the most part dead on, and the one that he wasn't correct he corrected like the next day ... you cannot fault him for saying that he has better things to do with his time then to try to work around a companies faulty drivers... he did it with ATI (and put off any code for the 8500's for like a year), but look where they got by fixing it. the Parhelia will probably be a powerful card under doom3, if and when both he and Matrox get around to making it work right.

keep in mind that it was Carmack and the followers of Quake/Quake2/Quake3 who brought OpenGL onto consumer graphics cards in any semblance of quality... and also keep in mind that many, many people prefer OpenGL to DirectX because of just how complicated, obfusicated and convoluted DirectX really is... it probably would have pushed the 3d hardware revolution back a ways if it were not for JC, because i can't think of anyone else who has been as vocal and as public with the issues that 3d graphics hardware does face... except for Derek Smart... hehe...

Carmack has proved before that he knows the pulse of the industry and is more than a fekking idiot... unlike Gibson...

[Pace]

Still, people need to learn to stop worshipping the guy.

And hopefully Matrox might've read his stuff on 64bit colour from a while back...

[ElDonAntonio]

DGhost, where can I check out some of JC's source code?

Still, whatever people say, I've learned to remain skeptical when someone that's part of a company gets that famous. I'm pretty sure there's a whole damn bunch of programmers around the world that could whip JC's ass but are just not superstars. Also, I think it would be naive to just consider JC responsible of the whole 3D revolution, and to think he coded everything all by himself. ID Software != JC.
Then again, correct me if I'm wrong, you probably know more on the subject than I do.

[ElDonAntonio]

Oh and also, I think his wrong comments about the Parhelia are still inexcusable, even if he corrected himself the day after. If he wants to state things publicly, he could at least make sure he has the facts right (very simple facts, btw). I just think he didn't like the card from the start, and snobbed Matrox by not even reading the specs correctly. I also doubt that (as he stated) it's that hard to make a simple program to illustrate Parhelia's superior memory bandwidth. If he wasn't able to do that, he certainly is no guru.

[redgreenbluex3]

I Think JC is a brilliant programer and he does deserve a large amount of his fame but there is other progamers that i believe should be just as famous as he, but who really cares. What i do not like is the fact that he pritty much just bagged out all the technologys on the parhelia and that none of them would be supported (including surrounding gaming) in doom.

[DGhost]

you can get the source code for doom, quake 1 and quake 2 from ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/ .

and yes, there are probably a bunch of other people who can whip his ass when it comes to programming. nor did he cause the 3D revolution.

but, iirc, until he did GLQuake not one vendor had a decent OpenGL ICD for their cards except for 3dfx. In fact the only one that he said it would work on was 3Dfx and workstation class boards. Quake2 was when a lot of vendors really started paying attention to OpenGL as a possibility for gaming. How many games were based on the Quake2 engine... seriously...

JC didn't write the whole games, but he did write the engines and he did do a lot of very vocal evangalizing for capable 3d accelerators... he pushed for better OpenGL drivers from companies and has also pushed for more features, often critisizing those who take a direction that he sees as pointless...

i tend to agree with him about hardware displacement mapping... it is pretty much a worthless feature at the moment, and it will be difficult for programmers to work into their code... and i agree with his comments on surround gaming, as in the next generation of games it will probably do very poorly except at low resolutions...

Edit: also, if i remember correctly, Anand had a hard time getting any good memory bandwidth numbers out of a Parhelia with either the Unreal Warfare performance test or the Unreal Tournament 2003 test he had...

and fyi, Matrox's OpenGL stack is *really* rough right now...

[Wombat]

Id software sure did = JC when they got started. It was a 4 man team, and JC was overwhelmingly-lead programmer.

It depends what you mean by 3D. Graphics, or game? Wolfenstein started the whole FPS genre, yes?

EDA, it wouldn't be the first time Matrox had trouble getting memory controllers right. Do you really think the G550 should have been slower than the two cards before it?

[UberLord]

Originally posted by DGhost
and fyi, Matrox's OpenGL stack is *really* rough right now...

Heh - the only major gripe I have with it is that it's very slow compared to what Matrox can do with Direct3D.

A good example of this is scene demos/intros (www.scene.org). Direct3D ones blaze through whislt the OpenGL ones are SLOW. Good exmaples of slow OpenGL ones are Le Petite Prince and Tesla Sunflower which run around half the speed of my old 8500 and Pandalization which runs about 1-2fps on my P. when my old 8500 was running around 60ish

The flipside is that all the fr-xx demos run very well on the P. compared to the 8500, but these are all Direct3D. They all run faster AND render more correctly - except for not quite transparent backgrounds on text.

Seriously, Matrox needs to make the OpenGL driver much faster

[Wombat]

That's probably because MicroSoft helps you with your DirectX, but you have to do OpenGL on your own.