Dimahnbloe
Newcomer
After analyzing the situation in the graphics market today, I must say that I am both disappointed and worried. The reason I say this is because within the past few month’s I think that we have been going backwards. I have noticed that game developers have started developing not only for the benefits of all hardware, but for features or code specific to one IHV
When I first saw it in Half-Life 2 the crossed my mind, but now it overwhelmingly apparent with the situation in Far-Cry. “Get in the Game,†and “The Way It’s Meant to be Played†is the modern day version of “Glide vs. OpenGL vs. DirectX: Game developers Coding for specific hardware enhancements instead of the better good of the industry. With Game developers taking money from hardware manufactures, what will be the difference between a game and a demo for Nvidia or ATI??
Take the Demo the Humus wrote for example, while it gave a considerable boost to ATI hardware, the gaines were not nearly as much for Nvidia’s hardware. Reading further down his post he stated that it could easily also be optimized for Nvidia hardware. The reason that I bring this up is not to shun his work, or show that he had ill-motives (sorry if it seemed that I did) but it is to simply state that if things continue to go the way that they are going right now, it would be easy for a Game developer to write un-optimized, or de-optimized code and still have the end result (the graphics that we view) look the same. In that situation I would not be able to catch them because I am not a game developer and I don’t think to many people have access to the code in such a way to do so. Instead of cheating in the drivers, they would be cheating in the Game. In my opinion, that is even worst.
I believe that Cry-Tech certain image enhancement are possible with PS2 as well as PS3, but what troubles me is that we have not seen any information from Cry-Tech stating that they are going to work to try to code for better PS 2.0 image enhancements or performance optimizations
The problem is that while some one from the Nvidia side of things are happy with Far Cry, they may not be as happy when a game comes out like half life 2 and is completely optimized for r400, leaving the nv40, the run it if you can mode,
What’s to say that Cry-Tech is not going out of their way to ensure that performance does not increase for the r400
I would take performance increases in Far-Cry and Half-Life 2 with a grain of salt and in my opinion, neither should be used for benchmarking purposes. They are both tainted, optimized for one vendor and possibly, purposely, de-optimized for the other.
Yes I do know that PS3 will be eventually supported by both manufacturer’s, but it may not be supported exactly the same way therefore there will be opportunities for enhancements that could have easily been adopted for both, but only adopted for one because the game developer is being paid to do so. Again this could be done without visual defects, so we would never know if the hardware is not as good as the other, or if it is the game developer not supporting the other hardware with the same efforts. Would it not piss you off if your card is running 20-30 FPS slower in a game because the game developer deemed that it was not in their “financial best interest†to write a few extra lines of code??(Not to say it’s always simply a few extra lines, you get the point)
In the End, we the consumer will loose, for the folks with an NV40 maybe not in far cry, but in half life two and for those with an r400, maybe not in Half-Life2 but in Doom three and ect..
*****
On a side note: Am I the only one that noticed that who noticed that with the new patch or drivers on the xbit labs review, that the GFX 5950 Scores plummeted by a considerable margin???? Is this the shape of the things to come for those people that purchased NV3x Generation of cards???
*****
When I first saw it in Half-Life 2 the crossed my mind, but now it overwhelmingly apparent with the situation in Far-Cry. “Get in the Game,†and “The Way It’s Meant to be Played†is the modern day version of “Glide vs. OpenGL vs. DirectX: Game developers Coding for specific hardware enhancements instead of the better good of the industry. With Game developers taking money from hardware manufactures, what will be the difference between a game and a demo for Nvidia or ATI??
Take the Demo the Humus wrote for example, while it gave a considerable boost to ATI hardware, the gaines were not nearly as much for Nvidia’s hardware. Reading further down his post he stated that it could easily also be optimized for Nvidia hardware. The reason that I bring this up is not to shun his work, or show that he had ill-motives (sorry if it seemed that I did) but it is to simply state that if things continue to go the way that they are going right now, it would be easy for a Game developer to write un-optimized, or de-optimized code and still have the end result (the graphics that we view) look the same. In that situation I would not be able to catch them because I am not a game developer and I don’t think to many people have access to the code in such a way to do so. Instead of cheating in the drivers, they would be cheating in the Game. In my opinion, that is even worst.
I believe that Cry-Tech certain image enhancement are possible with PS2 as well as PS3, but what troubles me is that we have not seen any information from Cry-Tech stating that they are going to work to try to code for better PS 2.0 image enhancements or performance optimizations
The problem is that while some one from the Nvidia side of things are happy with Far Cry, they may not be as happy when a game comes out like half life 2 and is completely optimized for r400, leaving the nv40, the run it if you can mode,
What’s to say that Cry-Tech is not going out of their way to ensure that performance does not increase for the r400
I would take performance increases in Far-Cry and Half-Life 2 with a grain of salt and in my opinion, neither should be used for benchmarking purposes. They are both tainted, optimized for one vendor and possibly, purposely, de-optimized for the other.
Yes I do know that PS3 will be eventually supported by both manufacturer’s, but it may not be supported exactly the same way therefore there will be opportunities for enhancements that could have easily been adopted for both, but only adopted for one because the game developer is being paid to do so. Again this could be done without visual defects, so we would never know if the hardware is not as good as the other, or if it is the game developer not supporting the other hardware with the same efforts. Would it not piss you off if your card is running 20-30 FPS slower in a game because the game developer deemed that it was not in their “financial best interest†to write a few extra lines of code??(Not to say it’s always simply a few extra lines, you get the point)
In the End, we the consumer will loose, for the folks with an NV40 maybe not in far cry, but in half life two and for those with an r400, maybe not in Half-Life2 but in Doom three and ect..
*****
On a side note: Am I the only one that noticed that who noticed that with the new patch or drivers on the xbit labs review, that the GFX 5950 Scores plummeted by a considerable margin???? Is this the shape of the things to come for those people that purchased NV3x Generation of cards???
*****
