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New DX10 Benchmarks Do More Bad than Good
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed May 23, 2007 05:15 PM
from the who-can-you-trust dept.
from the who-can-you-trust dept.
NIMBY writes "An interesting editorial over at PC Perspective looks at the changing status between modern game developers and companies like AMD and NVIDIA that depend on their work to show off their products. Recently, both AMD and NVIDIA separately helped in releasing DX10 benchmarks based on upcoming games that show the other hardware vendor in a negative light. But what went on behind the scenes? Can any collaboration these companies use actually be trusted by reviewers and the public to base a purchasing decision on? The author thinks the one source of resolution to this is have honest game developers take a stance for the gamer."
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John Carmack (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:John Carmack (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:John Carmack (Score:5, Interesting)
"JC: DX9 has its act together well. I like the version of DirectX on the 360. Microsoft is doing well with DX10 on tightening the specs and the exactness."
Of course, he's still calls it like it is:
"The new features are not exactly well-thought-out. Most developers are pretty happy with DX9. The changes with DX10 aren't as radical. It's not like getting pixel shaders for the first time. Single-pass shaders are nice with DX10, but it's a smaller change. "
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Re:John Carmack (Score:4, Informative)
It's like "they reduced the needs for annual service on the car by 10%, but didn't add a turbocharger".
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Re:John Carmack (Score:4, Funny)
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I thing, you thing, we all thing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I thing, you thing, we all thing (Score:5, Funny)
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The answer (Score:4, Insightful)
No. There is some room for an "Unless..." argument, but frankly, "reviews" like this are so biased that no sane person should knowingly take them into account while evaluating a purchase. Unless (hah!) it's as a strike against the companies doing it. But you're screwed on both sides, there, so...
DX10 (Score:5, Funny)
quit already with 'optimized' drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop fucking around and do it right the first time.
How hard is that?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens when a better way than the "known standard" comes around. Are we supposed to wait for some updated standard then updated hardware for that standard but by then don't you think some part of that standard will be obsolete?
Tweaked drivers, in most cases, only provide marginal benefits that many users would hardly notice. Yes, there are some stark exceptions where a different driver can have substantial impact, but this is often the game developer's fault as much as the hardwa
Re:quit already with 'optimized' drivers (Score:4, Informative)
In this case, DX10 (well, strictly D3D10) *is* the standard you're talking about. Waiting for a better way would involve waiting for D3D11 or similar. That's not what the OP's talking about.
Yes, there are some stark exceptions where a different driver can have substantial impact, but this is often the game developer's fault as much as the hardware developer.
I don't know about games, but I remember NVidia being caught cheating at 3DMark a couple of years ago. They released a driver that deliberately cut corners when it detected that that benchmark was being run, massively improving the framerate.
That's not so easy with games, but quite often optimisations can be made when you code for a specific case that can't (or shouldn't, for performance reasons) be made when coding more generally. I wouldn't put it past either vendor to tweak their drivers for say Half Life 3 at the expense of other, less hyped titles.
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Re:quit already with 'optimized' drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
You've got to remember, these guys live and die by sales. They *have* to look good in the numbers because that's what sells their cards at the top end. At the low end, no consumer cares either way as price dominates, but like automobiles, people assume that the tech from the top end trickles down to their lowly mass-market video hardware in some fashion, so it ends up still being relevant, if less directly so.
Also, if you have looked at most of these benchmarks, the difference between best and 2nd best is usually quite small, on the order of a couple percent. The bragging rights of being able to claim you can run your game at 150fps while other plebeans can only run at 140fps is just that - bragging rights. There is no practical effect on game play until framerates drop below 30fps. And the top end graphics hardware these days is not the bottleneck at resolutions of 1280x1024 and below, so really, these guys are chasing numbers in the rarified air of super high resolution monitors and games which use every trick in the book, which is an extremly small set of games actually played.
But that is what sells. And in any case, the competition between ATI and nVidia is good even if those of us who 'know' see their number-chasing as pointless. Let them do their thing, and reward or punish them at the counter as you see fit.
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Re:quit already with 'optimized' drivers (Score:4, Informative)
Driver manufacturers try and get the generic code paths as fast as they can, but they can always make the driver a little bit faster by applying some domain-specific knowledge. If they know that a particular game has a particular hot path, they can optimize that path. Maybe the optimization that they use wouldn't make sense for the general case, but they know it will work in that particular case.
Sure it would be nice to have a card that was great in everything, but there will always be a way to make it just a little faster for that one special case....and we're back to the current scenario.
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Driving people to consoles (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:quit already with 'optimized' drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time you write a piece of code you improve it you may find a new way of doing something.
Also as more and more programs come out that use the driver they people that write them will gain a better understanding of how they are used. That will help them optimize a code path. It could be as simple as selecting which branch tends to be used more and making that the default path.
The something is used the more performance you can get out of it.
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The French Resolution! (Score:4, Funny)
2048x1536 is the ONLY resolution.
Shows how bad DX-10 really is (Score:5, Insightful)
And there's no indication here if someone is using corked drivers that favor one game over the other.
What I'd like to see is a benchmark rundown of each function in DX10, along with some realistic estimate of how much each function is called in normal game play. If different games favor different functions, then say so. Only then might I have some idea of how the two graphics powerhouses measure up against each other.
And if you have some reasonable way of testing common sequences of calls, show that as well.
Re:Shows how bad DX-10 really is (Score:4, Insightful)
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Does it really matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using dedicated graphics cards since my old 3dfx Orchid Righteous 3D, since then I've had various ATI/nVidia cards and I've never been in the situation where I've thought "damn I wish I bought the other company's card".
I used to be someone that thought it was great to get 3 more fps than the other guy but when I came to realise that whilst I got 3 more fps in one game, and he got 5 more fps in another game that was OpenGL instead of DirectX or whatever. It became obvious that it's not as clear cut as one card is better than the other in terms of frame rates, it depends on the graphics API, the driver releases, the OS, the other hardware in the system, the game settings and on and on. Personally I prefer nVidia, but that's only because they have better developer support and I've had a better experience with the quality of their drivers over ATI's, image quality, features and frames per second has never once been an issue for me and I'm sure this is true for all but those people who think that getting an extra 3 more fps in game X actually makes the blindest bit of difference in the world.
Is it the DX 10 code or vista? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let them eat Directx! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As my Comp Sci lecture loved saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:May as well be Diogenes... (Score:4, Informative)
Twice.
You can benchmark in existing, released games. Those are the real application and as such the performances observed are relevant. The fact that their current driver is optimized or not does not matter, this is the current status.
Of course, as the author talks about pre-release, that does not apply here. The author is quite surprised that *BETA* code of incomplete demos runs better on the hardware of the company that helped the game developer. No foul play here.
In the same vein, you have 3dmark. Those are benchmarks developed in collaboration with ALL the players in the industry: AMD, Nvidia, Intel... They all have plenty of time to optimize their drivers and find bugs or non-optimized path. As this is a synthetic benchmark, results are less relevant.
So, in summary, the author complains that beta code is non optimized for all hardware.
A stupid complaint while the solution already exists: benchmark with known benchmark and final code.
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