Doomtrooper said:
I look at this way, Carmack is endorsing a inferior chipset as the 'DOOM 3 Card to have'.
Yes and no.
It's certainly inferior in floating point performance. That doesn't make it inferior for his game.
Where consumers will get "confused" about which cards are "the best at bleeding edge games", will be the likely assumption that Doom3 requires the latest "tech", because well, it's "an Id engine." This is very untrue.
Doom3 requires old, DX7 level tech....but requires that it be very, very fast.
By design, the best card for Doom3, is not necessarily the best for DX9 games.
The best cards for doom3:
1) Most effective multitexturing fill-rate
2) Most bandwidth
3) Support for fast stencil
4) Support for fast "fixed function dot-3 shading"
Those have little to do with DX9 capability.
The current 5900 has more multitextured fill-rate, more bandwidth, equal (maybe better?) stencil support, and fast dot-3 shading when in integer / fixed funtion precision. So it's not surprisng that the FX (with current specs) would beat a 9800 Pro by an amount that the fill-rate / bandwidth specs would suggest.
What's really interesting in this regard, is the Volari duo V8. It has TONS of raw pixel fill rate, this could potentially make it a very intersting doom3 card
if carmack makes a special path for it. (And if XGI exposes special extensions for him to do so.)
If carmack doesn't make a special path for it, it will be forced to use the ARB2 path (floating point) to be fully featured, which might cut its performance in half.
...Now we have the market flooded with inferior graphic processors all based off...money. Games optimized for FX and FP 16 formats.
I wouldn't worry about it. Half-Life is going to be a staple in benchmarks much like Doom3, and Half-Life is basically here now. These two benchmarks represent a nice contrast: performance in highly stressful "old architecture" apps (Doom3), and performance in new tech apps (Half-Life).
