How to boost your Doom3 performance by 40% on ATI hardware

I'd hate to work for your company if they'd fire you over starting this thread topic. It looks like this thread was started on the weekend so I doubt Humus' boss has even read it.

 

BS! None of the frequent visitors here from ATI, Nvidia, PowerVR, or elsewhere ask their bosses for permission before each post.

Read the thread, start at the beginning. This is clearly not an official ATI release of any sort, its one person experimenting to see if changing shader code can improve performance.

You clearly don't understand the nature of the tweak, or the fact that it was basically expected to behave strangely from the start and is not final. A final version may likely get the boost and have no visual artifacts, the only way it won't is if the math can't replace the texture lookup, which would only happen if the texture lookup table represents a very complicated function.

Stop turning this into a flame-fest when you don't know jack.

Its an experimental tweak in an ONGOING investigation. It may turn out that it can be incorporated without reducing IQ, or it may not. And that depends much on iD since it would require the specular value to be passed into the shader in a constant.

 

What if this thread topic ends up shining a negative light on ATI, making it look like they have to use IQ-reducing shader code replacements to improve performance?

That would have an impact on the whole company with the enthusiast community, and certainly would be grounds for getting fired if the code was released without approval.

And scott, I'm well aware of the nature of the tweak.

 

It doesn't work. There is no light shader defined anyway. I tried to use exploding plasma light shader and fireball light shader but no effect.

EDIT:

OMG, I got it working. It's a bit overdone so I tweak settings. Looks fantastic but kills frame rate totally when firing rapidly.

 

The driver has everything to do with shader tweaking. If ATI had better OGL support than Nvidia, than this wouldn't be a problem. All of the tweaking comes about because the game runs worse on ATI hardware. I'm not flaming ATI, just pointing out the obvious. ATI obviously has better support in general for DX, but they lack in OGL and always have. Why else would they be rewriting their OGL drivers? I guess your an ATI fanatic, one who can not admit that ATI can make mistakes. Whats going to happen when they come out with a SM 3.0 patch for D3?? Just a thought to keep the thread moving.

 

Beyond3D is a technical forum, not a gamers forum. Humus did this whole thing to show that the shader could be optimized by ID to bring better performance without IQ loss for ATI cards. You're thinking purely from a gamer's perspective, but that's the wrong perspective here on Beyond3D.

 

Heh. Ford releases hp impvoement tweaks all the time . They have a magazine devoted to it .

You can call bullshit on whatever you want . I don't see the problem.

I can call bullshit on people with 2 posts posting that they see problems on here and rage 3d and on your posts with people who don't even own an ati card complaining and saying others see problems so these must be bad.

Based on your posting history i call buillshit on everything u say

 

Heh, that will only happen if fud heads spin up their BS engines, im very much against this kind of crap on either side, almost to the point where even when theres solid proof backing this stuff up it still pisses me off. Recently I have choosen to ignore this stuff but with the recurrance of fighting spirit in all the nvidia loyalists lately and the involvement of this crap in threads that might help me increase my doom3 performance...its getting damn hard.

Why can't they just be like AMD and Intel, silently hate each other.

 

well if people like you go around claiming its an ati tweak then yes there will be problems .

But then again some people will do everything to make a company they don't like look bad huh .

 

Im not a regular poster and I dont like talking this way but I think the only person who is trying to turn this into that is you.

Anyone who tries this has clear warning that it could potentially cause them problems. How could they blame Ati for something they modified of their own free will.

 

Hmm nvidia must have really really bad drivers then.

Considering there is an nv10 path , nv20 path , at one point an nv3x path. Then they have optimizations from the nv3x path in thier drivers .

Wow nvidia needs to take a page out of ati's book and get some quality drivers

 

Ruined:

If you were truly aware, you wouldn't be saying what you are.

Further:

Do you know what selection bias is?



ok back to you understanding what the tweak does.... If you really do understand, then perhaps your motivatin is here:

If you make enough fuss about how this "official" tweak reduces IQ you can make ATI look bad.
Even if its not official, and doesn't affect IQ at all in its final form.


supertoker:

Well, SM 3.0 Is D3D so.... thats not going to happen.



Yeah, there is a negative here for ATI: their texture caching seems to break pretty badly for this case. But that's not the point... the point is that it may be likely that a perf tweak can help some ATI cards in D3, without IQ loss at all. This demonstration shows a performance enhancing tweak that is applied with IQ loss, a form of it that does not have IQ loss is possible but not worked out yet.

That is, the nature of the tweak does not affect IQ, this specific implimentation does.

 

Well there was a rational and un emotional post There have been some post with people having visual anomalies over at drivers heaven 3dcenter and futuremark as well so its not all that isolated. As humas said earlier its not a mathematical equivalent so there will be some differences, ever considered Mr Carmack had the texture lookup there for a reason?
Now ill be quiet before someone gets technical on my ass, I freely admit I don’t know squat about the technical side but I do know when I see anomalies in games. Well peoples screenshots anyway, I’m still waiting for my copy, damn the13th

 

well all of you are saying that it is "reducing" the IQ of the game... do you all say that only because of the modification of the shader file? Personally I notice no difference to the naked eye.

 

Like most iq reductions is only noticeable with side by side comparisons

 

Uhm, no.

I've still yet to see these artifacts and discrepencies I see listed here, and I've been playing D3 a lot looking.

This isn't an ATi-thing Ruined, it's an ATi enthusiasts-thing....we're experimenting, let us have our fun!

 

ANd I'm not saying no one has problems.

I have clearly said I'm running in ultra mode with no other tweaks and have no problems .


There are problems and some of them can be fixed (someone posted a fix in this very thread)

Remember this is people editing stuff on thier own. If id aproves this and adds it to a patch it will be universal and no one should have iq problems.

The fact that most of the people doing this are seeing no problems is a positive thing .

 

I find it ironic all these people coming here and talking about "ATI Shader Replacements" and pretending they know what they are talking about when the fact that this increases the performance indicates that there is actually no "shader replacements" already occuring!!

When talking of shader repalcements its in relation to precomputed shaders in the drivers that are run as alternatives to the game supplied ones - not manually tweaked game shaders. If, in fact, you see performance drops from things like this its actually because the tweak will break the detection and run the real game code (well, the newly tweaked code) rather than the pre-supplied shader.

 

Damn it Ruined, stop it. Go and post up your indignations at nVnews and get rah-rahed or else start a new thread here in Feedback expressing your distate for it, but please stop thread crapping on this excellent thread!

That goes for everyone whining, 'specially those who just joined up to whine.

If you have a point that is relevant than by all means share it, but if you just want to post up about how wrong and evil it is please do it somewhere else.

 

Sorry I jumped bits of the thread. I should have read more I appologise.

I do hope the problems can be fixed for as Scott C said its not the tweak itself that causes the problems, just its implementation here (hope that made scense)