Originally posted by: Shad0hawK
card is under Nvidia's TWIMTBP umbrella, Rollo, ehrm, Genx87 considers the card unoptimized .
i guess that just shows id has the programming(and objectivity) skills valve does not, after all ID's game apparantly will run reasonably well on all relatively modern cards, not just the vid card company "sponsoring" them...
do i ned sarcasm tags?[/quote]
Do you really want to display your bias so nakedly, Shad0hawK ? Even if you think Half Life was a piece of cr@p, you have to admit that Valve has a talented team of developers that developed an extremely well received and universally praised (by review sites) game in Half Life, and Half Life 2 is one of the most anticipated PC games ever, along with Doom3.
All of the issues of developing Doom3 and Half Life 2 are right on the table, and there's no need to take potshots at either company, who have both shown their aptitude in developing game engines.
id decided to go with Carmack's preference, OpenGL. OpenGL is traditionally a better performer on Nvidia hardware; kudos to Nvidia for their better optimized OpenGL drivers. Doom3 is almost out; it's taken 5+ years to develop.
Half Life 2 won best of E3
last year, and it's still being updated and worked on to this date. It was one of the most brilliant tech demos ever; their physics engine looks amazing and the game, if ever completed ( ) is going to sell millions. They chose what is more or less the industry standard, DirectX, and decided to go with the (then-current) DirectX9.0 standard, established by
Microsoft, not ATI.
Nvidia decided not to design full DX9 (PS/VS 2.0) compatibility into their NV3x architecture; obviously this was because the card was in planning stages before the DX9 spec was finalized. So instead of ignoring Nvidia altogether, Valve released a public statement saying they worked 5X longer completing a PS 1.1/2.0 mixed mode for NV3x cards, to go along with their 'full' PS 2.0 mode.
Nvidia could have put resources into making NV3
5 fully DX9.0 compatible, and they had a couple of years to do this while NV30 waited for .13 to be mature enough for release. Instead they (IMO wisely) waited and put all their eggs into the 'future' basket and planned out the NV4x series to be the advanced chipset it is today. However, their misstep of NV30 is a mistake that is impossible to just ignore.
Doom3 looks to run well on Radeon 9700+ /FX5800+ architectures, but looks to really be beautiful on current gen hardware.
HL2 is in beta and looks to be a similar parformer to Doom3 when finished, maybe a bit slower (judging by
beta results); playable on 9700+ hardware but running even better on current gen hardware. Valve has spent more like 6 years on HL2, and the game is supposedly set to release this fall (although, we know how accurate these predictions can be...)
Where is the lack of programming skills and "
objectivity" (???) skills on Valve's part? It's all on the table - the rendering paths that the two development houses have chosen, the strengths and weaknesses of ATI's and Nvidia's hardware, and ATI's and NVidia's choices for supported features in their architectures. How does that translate to a lack of foresight by
Valve, who made the most of a bad situation with the NV3x architecture (see:
moratorium on NV3x hardware @ Anandtech)? Will you not admit to this being an error on
Nvidia's part?