Carmack on Doom 3 @ E3

[Linguica]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32424&cid=3499718

I am helping a hardware vendor optimize the E3 build of Doom right now, but I'll make a pass of replys and comments later on tonight...

Hardware vendors with an E3 build of Doom? Does that mean that not just id's little booth in the Activision section will be showing Doom 3?

[Mastaba]

That is what it seems to imply.

[Naked Snake]

Hey Ling, did you get your pass to E3 yet?

[Zaldron]

Last month I wrote the Radeon 8500 support for Doom. The bottom line is that
it will be a fine card for the game, but the details are sort of interesting.

I had a pre-production board before Siggraph last year, and we were discussing
the possibility of letting ATI show a Doom demo behind closed doors on it. We
were all very busy at the time, but I took a shot at bringing up support over
a weekend. I hadn't coded any of the support for the custom ATI extensions
yet, but I ran the game using only standard OpenGL calls (this is not a
supported path, because without bump mapping everything looks horrible) to see
how it would do. It didn't even draw the console correctly, because they had
driver bugs with texGen. I thought the odds were very long against having all
the new, untested extensions working properly, so I pushed off working on it
until they had revved the drivers a few more times.

My judgment was colored by the experience of bringing up Doom on the original
Radeon card a year earlier, which involved chasing a lot of driver bugs. Note
that ATI was very responsive, working closely with me on it, and we were able
to get everything resolved, but I still had no expectation that things would
work correctly the first time.

And this is pretty old. I imagine it's ATI time to pimp their cards.

[Dima]

I'd imagine that he is tweaking the engine to run on different cards at the Activision stand.

[Linguica]

When companies show off games at E3, they ususally don't give out any information about what the system being used to run the game is, and they certainly don't run different boxes with different components. The fact that Carmack is helping a hardware vendor optimize Doom makes it sound to me like they're giving hardware vendors some sort of OEM thingy to show off how leetass their new cards are.

[Zoost]

I can imagine that it is also in the interest of id that they can prove that their state of the art technology (to quote Paul Jaquays - "Doom, while popular with a certain class of game player, is going to either have hardware requirements far above and beyond that of the average computer owner...") Can (!) run on different types of hardware configurations that can be seen as mainstream (Radeon 8500, Geforce 3)

On the other hand all hardware vendors want off course to show off their hardware (look, it can even run DOOM III)

So both parties benefit.

[Zaldron]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1620

Matrox.

[Weedster]

Tite. Now if only I had acess to E3....