Halflife 2, DirectX 9.0, Game Engines, and ATI vs. nVidia

saigumi · Post by **saigumi** » Thu Sep 11, 2003 1:10 pm

For those of us who like making games, you might find this to be very interesting.

Gabe Newell speaks about the trials and tribulations of getting HL2 to work well on nVidia hardware.

5 times the devlopement time to get it to run decent on a Geforce 5900 and it still doesn't perform as well as a Radeon 9800 with DirectX 9.It does say that DX 8 is ok, though.

I like the tweaking style of the nVidia drivers as opposed to the ATI, but the last set of Catalysts that I used was the 3.2 set.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTE5

Cyber_Sneak · Post by **Cyber_Sneak** » Thu Sep 11, 2003 9:28 pm

what do u think about Cg? do u think it will be useful at all or will it fizzle out the way the voodoo cards did? i kinda agree with the latter oppinion (it will fizzle out) especially with OpenGL 2.0 (supposedly) on the horizon.

saigumi · Post by **saigumi** » Fri Sep 12, 2003 1:11 pm

I haven't tried Cg yet and I've really only tried using shaders once to try out cel-shading.

I like standards, though. They are there to make our lives easier and focusable. More news and press releases have started trickling down and it seems that nVidia's 51.xx drivers may have improvements, but I'm unsure if they are improvements for DX 9.0 as a whole or just for HalfLife 2.

nVidia does have really nice OpenGL speeds though and that will be a great strength with Doom 3.

niko · Post by **niko** » Fri Sep 12, 2003 1:37 pm

Hm, maybe I misunderstood something, but I thought Doom3 runs with D3D?

[dx/x]=HUNT3R · Post by **[dx/x]=HUNT3R** » Fri Sep 12, 2003 9:24 pm

John Carmack is the OpenGL god. All the Quake and Wolfenstein engines were built off of OpenGL, I thought that Doom is OpenGL also.

Zaelsius · Post by **Zaelsius** » Mon Sep 15, 2003 4:19 pm

niko wrote:Hm, maybe I misunderstood something, but I thought Doom3 runs with D3D?

Yes Carmack still prefers OpenGL.. but doesn't have a bad opinion about latest DirectX releases(8/9). Some people said that the machines used to test Doom3 Multiplayer in the QuakeCon 2003 were running Linux...

niko · Post by **niko** » Mon Sep 15, 2003 5:00 pm

Wow, very interesting..

[dx/x]=HUNT3R · Post by **[dx/x]=HUNT3R** » Tue Sep 16, 2003 9:11 pm

NVIDIA RULES!!!

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Sep 21, 2003 2:01 am

The new wolfenstein, based on the quake3 engine, is entirely opengl. Carmack uses mostly C in the engine, in fact, the core rendering engine is C, but some of the game is C++. Doom3 is entirely opengl.

The old wolfenstein and doom are both software (btw: d3d didn't even exist back then... not sure if ogl did though).

I don't think there is much chance that Carmack's going to start using direct3d unless he starts using C++ in the engine, they used directinput in quake2/3 and it was C, but it was oooooglay.

[dx/x]=HUNT3R · Post by **[dx/x]=HUNT3R** » Sun Sep 21, 2003 2:52 am

Yes I agree... NVIDIA RULES