Hardware News

Carmack on N30 vs R300

Joe "OuTkAsT-1" Topolnisky

2003-01-30 00:03:00.0


id Software's John Carmack has updated his .plan with a comparison of NVIDIA's GeForce FX and ATI's Radeon 9700. When the man speaks, people listen. Snip:

At the moment, the NV30 is slightly faster on most scenes in Doom than the R300, but I can still find some scenes where the R300 pulls a little bit ahead. The issue is complicated because of the different ways the cards can choose to run the game.
The R300 can run Doom in three different modes: ARB (minimum extensions, no specular highlights, no vertex programs), R200 (full featured, almost always single pass interaction rendering), ARB2 (floating point fragment shaders, minor quality improvements, always single pass).
The NV30 can run DOOM in five different modes: ARB, NV10 (full featured, five rendering passes, no vertex programs), NV20 (full featured, two or three rendering passes), NV30 ( full featured, single pass), and ARB2.

Read on.

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