Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Interview

[Richard]

<a href="http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/etqw/"><img border="1" src="http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/etqw/images/focus.gif" align="right" width="120" height="75"></a>"Huge bright outdoors" and "32 player matches" are likely not the first thoughts that come to mind when one talks about the DOOM 3 engine but <a target="_b3dout" href="http://www.splashdamage.com">Splash Damage</a> and <a target="_b3dout" href="http://www.idsoftware.com">id Software</a> are planning to change this perception with Enemy Territory: <a target="_b3dout" href="http://www.quakewars.com">QUAKE Wars</a>.

The team is hard at work on the game and finishing up the demo they will let people play in a couple of weeks at E3 but Arnout van Meer, ETQW’s Technical Director, graciously answered a few questions about the game’s improved renderer. Like most at the company, Arnout comes from the mod community where he worked on <a target="_b3dout" href="http://www.q3f.com">Quake 3 Fortress</a> and <a target="_b3dout" href="http://www.castlewolfenstein.com">Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory</a> as Lead Programmer.

Read the full interview <a href="http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/etqw/">here</a>.

[Kanyamagufa]

Well done, Mord, well done indeed. Thank you!

ETQW is looking awesome. Hey, that works on multiple levels...!

Interesting how many devs are opting for bloom instead of/in addition to HDR. Makes me think that while HDR was the buzzword for R5x0 and G7x, it is still relatively premature. Especially when IQ enthusiasts demand AA alongside it.

Obviously HDR is the future, I just find it interesting how big a deal was made over it only to have it be very sparse during this wave of GPUs.

edit - Grammar.

[AlStrong]

Thanks Mord. :)


I was thinking that the prevalence of bloom is due to the Xbox...

[Sxotty]

That was a great read thanks.

[trinibwoy]

The MegaTexture shaders are a set of special case version of our normal ones which deal with ambient lighting, normal light interaction and the other stages in our pipeline. They are some of the more expensive ones in the game, and fairly heavy on texture reads. Depending on the target hardware, some of the texture lookups get replaced by ALU instructions to improve performance.

How exactly can ALU instructions replace texture lookups in a case like this? It's not like the texture stores results of some mathematical process, or does it?

[RobertR1]

So another shader heavy game? I guess the prediction of switching to shader is starting to become true. Should make for some interesting benchmarks.

[Jawed]

How exactly can ALU instructions replace texture lookups in a case like this? It's not like the texture stores results of some mathematical process, or does it?
Yep, that's how textures are often used. e.g. specular lighting in D3 is done this way and ATI cards have a shader replacement to use maths instead.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12803

Jawed

[Tokelil]

Depending on the target hardware, some of the texture lookups get replaced by ALU instructions to improve performance.I wonder if this means the x1600/1900... If it can be done it sounds like that would be optimal. On the other hand I remember back at Humus Doom3? patch for R3xx/R420.

[Geo]

I hit my rep button, Mord, but it's been too soon since last time. . .

[trinibwoy]

Yep, that's how textures are often used. e.g. specular lighting in D3 is done this way and ATI cards have a shader replacement to use maths instead.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12803

Jawed

Yeah that particular one is famous but I was thinking of exactly the opposite. For some reason I assumed the heavy texture usage was non-lighting related megatexture processing (material characteristics/streaming logic?) since he made the distinction between MegaTexture shaders and the more conventional lighting shaders. I guess the "They" in "They are some of the more expensive ones in the game, and fairly heavy on texture reads" refers to "our normal ones" and not specifically "MegaTexture shaders".

[Jawed]

My interpretation, for what it's worth:

Not every surface in the game is "megatextured" (have to wait for a future game for that to be the case). So there are two sets of shaders, those that are for megatextured surfaces (i.e. terrain) and everything else.

The megatexturing shaders do the kind of general rendering that the normal shaders do plus they handle megatexturing. Since the normal shaders do some of their work with math-textures, this also applies to the megatexturing shaders.

The specific point being made here is that these megatexturing shaders make use of math, instead of math-textures, as a performance enhancement on certain hardware.

Jawed

[trinibwoy]

The specific point being made here is that these megatexturing shaders make use of math, instead of math-textures, as a performance enhancement on certain hardware.

Well, that's kind of why I interpreted it the way I did, because this specific phenomenon is not unique to megatexture shaders and probably applies across the board on the given hardware.