Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Reason #738 Why John Carmack is Cool

An ATI employee with the online name of 'Humus' took a look at the shader instructions in Doom 3 and decided, on his own, that he could improve them for ATI cards. Apparently, the Doom 3 code is optimized individually for several generation of Nvidia cards, but not for ATI. So the ATI shader instructions were not optimized for the newer cards and the X800 line in particular. So Humus optimized the shader instructions for the higher-end Radeon cards, and the performance differences are pretty spectacular. Here's the thread at Beyond3D, and it's a long one (although the first post of the topic has a link to the file you need to try out the optimized code): http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14874.

There are plenty of developers who would freak out over this. Others would get totally pissed off. What does John Carmack do? He has an e-mail exchange with Humus to help him. How can you not like that?

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