GeForce FX cards will have dire Doom 3 performance?

SpinnerSpinner Birmingham, UK
edited September 2003 in Science & Tech
It has come to light that not only is GeForceFX Pixel shader performance awful, it will now have to run it in 12 or 16bit mode to try and compensate, this is going to annoy lots of people.
We emailed id Software guru, John Carmack about his experience with NV3x hardware on Pixel Shading performance, and this was his reply:

GD: John, we've found that NVIDIA hardware seems to come to a crawl whenever Pixel Shader's are involved, namely PS 2.0..

Have you witnessed any of this while testing under the Doom3 environment?

"Yes. NV30 class hardware can run the ARB2 path that uses ARB_fragment_program, but it is very slow, which is why I have a separate NV30 back end that uses NV_fragment_program to specify most of the operations as 12 or 16 bit instead of 32 bit."

John Carmack

Source Article:
http://www.gamersdepot.com/hardware/video_cards/ati_vs_nvidia/dx9_desktop/001.htm

Thanks to Nightshade737 for the heads up on this one

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited September 2003
    Interesting.

    Why has this changed?

    Even the GeForceFX 5800 had better performance than the 9800 Pro in HardOCP <b>and</b> Anandtech's Doom3 benchmarks.
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    edited September 2003
    http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=dire (not that it really matters)
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited September 2003
    Dire = Terrible
    Terrible Performance. Don't see a problem to be honest.

    Thrax: Its since they have implemented the Pixel Shaders V2 that this all came to light.

    NS
  • Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
    edited September 2003
    Probably there have been changes in the Game Software Tested. And certainly ATI has revised it's Catalyst 3x drivers several times since the D3 benchmarks.

    Are Halo beta1.5 and TR:AOD DX9 software?
  • SimGuySimGuy Ottawa, Canada
    edited September 2003
    I'm going to say that these tests are not necessarily indicitive of the final performance we'll see on both ATI & NVidia based cards, as neither has been completely optimized for use with the Doom 3 software platform and the Doom 3 software platform has not been optimized for any type of card.

    I'll judge performance of the hardware on the final version of Doom 3, not the un-optimized alpha version.
  • TemplarTemplar You first.
    edited September 2003
    Still.. even if not optimized, D3 is supposed to push some major visuals. This isn't looking good for D3 if they predicted the speed of processors and video cards to be a lot better in a year, which I doubt we'll see anything beyond general improve this and that and clock this faster (Which isn't bad, but it's not revolutionary). D3's gonna suck if no one can run it faster than 10fps standing in a 30ft corridor looking at the floor :(
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