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August 11, 2004

John Carmack knows A LOT more than you

And so do a lot of folks over at Beyond3D. And at ATI.

This past Sunday on the Beyond3D forums, an ATI engineer named Humus posted a process by which DOOM III players using ATI cards could speed up performance by 40%. He did this by digging into the D3 shader files, and found a significant inefficiency with regards to newer ATI cards. By making 2 small changes to said shaders, he made John Carmack look a little silly.

However, Beyond3D followed the thread by interviewing Mr. Carmack himself. His response indicates that he didn't expect development to go so long, and therefore underestimated the cards that would be available at the time of release. It seems that the compromise was overall better performance on all cards, vs. significant increases on modern cards.

The interview is pretty tough to read (this particular topic is covered on page deux). I had to read the original thread to get an idea of what he was really talking about.

Posted by jb at August 11, 2004 09:24 PM