Wednesday, April 5, 2000

Carmack on 3D graphics -- 7:54 am CST, Update by The Master

John Carmack has been posting his thoughts to the slashdot forums quite a bit lately. Yesterday he posted his views of the current hardware on the new 1GHZ P3 processors. And it's not actually full-on-super-techy either! :-)

A GeForce should be able to run Q3 at 200 fps at 400x300 (r_mode 1) or possibly even 512x384 resolution if the cpu was fast enough. A dual willamette at the end of this year will probably do it.

We currently see 100+ fps timedemos at 640x480 with either a 1ghz processor or dual 800's, and that isn't completely fill rate limited. DDR GeForce cards are really, really fast.

Yes, it is almost completely pointless.

The only reasonable argument for super high framerates is to do multi frame composited motion blur, but it turns out that it isn't all that impressive.

I did a set of offline renderings of running Q3 at 1000 fps and blending down to 60 fps for display. Looked at individually, the screenshots were AWESOME, with characters blurring through their animations and gibs streaking off the screen, but when they were played at 60hz, nobody could tell the difference even side by side.
..
Exagerated motion blur (light sabers, etc) is a separate issue, and doesn't require ultra-high framerates.

There are still plenty of things we can usefully burn faster cpu's on...

Yeah-like better AI, more realistic lighting, more action in the worlds . . .

News for 04/05/2000

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