John Carmacks Quakecon keynote

[Johnny Rotten]

Thought some readers might be interested in listening to Carmacks presentation at Quakecon. A large focus on the 3d hardware industry in general as well as more specific 3d related topics. Interesting stuff. Carmack even cracks a couple of good jokes!

http://www.monstaquake.com/admins/railchu/John_Carmack_-_Quakecon_2002_Speech.mp3

 

[Nagorak]

Thanks for the link!

 

[LittlePenny]

I agree, thankyou! Too bad I have to wait till morning to listen, and then we shall see if my P200 can even run the file

 

[phynicle]

hahahah lil penny
are you waiting for the hammer release til upgrade
coz i'm the same

 

[phynicle]

this thing would be better if it came with video

 

[Doomtrooper]

Just stare at the picture and imagine his mouth moving..

Seriously tx for the link.

 

[Geeforcer]

Thanks! Great stuff.

Interesting:

So right now we have NV10, NV20, NV30 backends, a standard backend, we got a R200 backend that’s currently supporting the 8700(???) and ...(unintelligible… Sounds like “9300â€￾, but I am not sure).. 9500(?) ATi cards, there is some pressure to go ahead and specialize it yet more to take some more advantage of the newer things, and then we got backends for 3Dlabs, potentially Matrox and SIS and we'll se how the rest of those go along, but its a real pain to just go ahead and take advantage of the features of each of these...

Hum... confusing...

Edit: Somewhat less confusing now, thanks to OpenGLguy.

 

[OpenGL guy]

Thanks! Great stuff.

Interesting:

So right now we have NV10, NV20, NV30 back-ins, a standard back-in, we got a R200 back-in that’s currently supporting the 8700(???) and ...(unintelligible… Sounds like “9300”, but I am not sure).. 9500(?) ATi cards, there is some pressure to go ahead and specialize it yet more to take some more advantage of the newer things, and then we got back-ins for 3Dlabs, potentially Matrox and SIS and we'll se how the rest of those go along, but its a real pain to just go ahead and take advantage of the features of each of these...

Hum... confusing...

I believe "back-in" should be "back-end".

 

[Geeforcer]

Jesus, and there I was wondering whether I am going insane... remind we not to do this kind of thing at 3 am anymore. Thanks, I gonna change it now.

Now that this is cleared up, however, some questions still remain. Back-end for NV30, already? Which Ati cards does he have back-ends for, exactly? (That part is all kind of gibbered up)

 

[LeStoffer]

Bloody hell, it is only demoed at 800x600 with a top-of-the-line system!

Taken from gamespot's coverage on QuakeCon 2002:

At E3 the demo was running at 640x480 at medium detail levels, but at QuakeCon, the settings have been increased to 800x600 at high quality levels. In both cases, the hardware is the same: a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 and a Radeon 9700--ATI's soon-to-be-released graphics card. The higher resolution for the QuakeCon demo is due to new ATI drivers and general optimizations.

I know that it isn't done and optimized yet, but still.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Now that this is cleared up, however, some questions still remain. Back-end for NV30, already? Which Ati cards does he have back-ends for, exactly? (That part is all kind of gibbered up)

Seems that Radeon 8500 and Radeon 9700 will be going through same render path. The question is - how much extra benefit will there be optimising further for 9700? 8500 could already perform the entire operations in a single path so in that area he may already be at the point of diminishing returns, however GF3/4 couldn't so it stands to reason that he'd write a render path for NV30 to allow it to do it in one path.

 

[pascal]

Bloody hell, it is only demoed at 800x600 with a top-of-the-line system!

Taken from gamespot's coverage on QuakeCon 2002:

At E3 the demo was running at 640x480 at medium detail levels, but at QuakeCon, the settings have been increased to 800x600 at high quality levels. In both cases, the hardware is the same: a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 and a Radeon 9700--ATI's soon-to-be-released graphics card. The higher resolution for the QuakeCon demo is due to new ATI drivers and general optimizations.

I know that it isn't done and optimized yet, but still.

This is something that I had noticed with the MPEGS and AVIs I have about the Doom3 gameplay, even at low resolution it is incredibilly realistic and you can put it to play at full screen and have a very immersive experience. This is a new paradigm, what is more realistic a 1024x768x32 Q3 pic or your own pic at 320x240 black&white? There are tons of info in the Doom3 pics.

BTW, thanks for the link

 

[pascal]

Just stare at the picture and imagine his mouth moving.. ...

 

[Heathen]

Render paths

Seems that Radeon 8500 and Radeon 9700 will be going through same render path.

Would this the mean Doom III would still be using PS1.4 code, via GL_ATI_Fragment_Shader, on the 9700? Or are the two, rendering passes and shader code, seperate?

Additionally I remember in a recent plan file, JC mentioned OpenGL2 support. What sort of odds are there for the R300 and NV30 having OpenGL2 drivers in the future? And what sort of avantages could we see from OepnGL 2?

 

[pascal]

Gamespy article about the speak: http://www.gamespy.com/articles/august02/quakecon2002/carmack/

 

[pascal]

Carmack:
"I am on the record as saying that the next game engine that I work on, after Doom here, is going to be written in a high level shading language. There's just no doubt about it. There's not going to be custom, per-card assembly specifications going on there. It's going to be in a high-level language, and the drivers are just going to have to deal with it there."

 

[Dave B(TotalVR)]

Skip to five exactly minutes before the end...

What the hell is that whine he coms out with? what the hell is wrong with his voice? its baffling!

 

[Thowllly]

Skip to five exactly minutes before the end...

What the hell is that whine he coms out with? what the hell is wrong with his voice? its baffling!

What I'm wondering, is what the hell is that goat doing there? (at -4:11 and -2:40)

 

[Dio]

After the first time I met JC, a friend of mine said to me, "Please, tell me he sounds weird or has a massive mole on his head or something. He got all the brains after all..."

He's a very nice bloke. Drinks less than the average games programmer though which probably explains A. why I can't get to be a mate of his as easily as the rest of the industry and B. why his code is so damn good.

As for the goat, never discount the possibility of 'silly idiots in the audience'. Myself and a friend once caused a radio show's ambient noise track to be largely full of sheep noises by the simple expedient of standing next to the mics (Edit: and making sheep noises, before you smart-guys get onto that one).

 

[Pete]

I like the way he thinks:

Carmack stressed that he prefers to have a title which appears the same on a variety of systems, and requires lower resolutions for increased framerates, than a title which turns off effects to achieve higher framerates.