Pubblicato, a
questo indirizzo, il nuovo plan di John Carmack, programmatore capo della software house ID SOftware. Da quest'azienda proverrà il titolo più atteso di tutto il 2003, Doom III.
Il confronto tra le due GPU video top della gamma attuale, ATI R300 (Radoen 9700PRO) e nVidia NV30 (GeForce FX), vede prevalere la seconda stando ai risultati di Carmack con Doom III. Le due schede hanno approcci qualitativi leggermente differenti, inoltre non bisogna dimenticare che entro 2 mesi ATI introdurrà il nuovo chip R350, evoluzione del progetto R300 che dovrebbe permettere di ottenere prestaizoni velocistiche ancor più elevate e, di conseguenza, distanziare la scheda NV30 di nVidia.
*****
At the moment, the NV30 is slightly faster on most scenes in Doom than the R300, but I can still find some scenes where the R300 pulls a little bit ahead. The issue is complicated because of the different ways the cards can choose to run the game.
The R300 can run Doom in three different modes: ARB (minimum extensions, no specular highlights, no vertex programs), R200 (full featured, almost always single pass interaction rendering), ARB2 (floating point fragment shaders, minor quality improvements, always single pass).
The NV30 can run DOOM in five different modes: ARB, NV10 (full featured, five rendering passes, no vertex programs), NV20 (full featured, two or three rendering passes), NV30 ( full featured, single pass), and ARB2.
The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path. Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.
*****