ATI and Doom III
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
First, let me just point out that after the completion of the Quakecon 2002 show, all of the individual day articles will be compiled into a single article for easier viewing later on. Breaking them up this way keeps things organized for daily readers.My day yesterday was busy, and I knew that today would be no different. My first stop was at the ATI Technology Workshop, which was basically where ATI was showing some demos and presentations on the technology behind the new ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card. They detailed a lot of the technical specifications that the new chipset offers including AGP 8x support for up to 2.1 GB/s of bandwidth.
The demos ATI used in the conference room on the projectors were very impressive, showing off many of the new lighting and mapping features of the Radeon 9700 series cards. While the split screen demos between an 8500 and 9700 looked decent and you saw a slight image difference on the projectors, it was only up close on the monitors that you began to really see the power of the ATI video card shining through. The demos using a dual-toned car showed off the added paths for floating point calculations and another demo that used pinballs to play music on keyboards and drums showed off the sheer power of the 9700 Pro chipset.
Doom III
While Amdmb.com is not a gaming site, most people that do visit the site play games. I know I like to do some fragging when I have spare time. The Doom III presentations that I saw while at Quakecon simply blew me away. The first one I saw was the Doom III Theater that was setup inside the convention center. This self-contained room had the Doom III game running in real time while showing off a scripted scene. It lasted for about 15 minutes and demonstrated the new physics engine and many new features that you are sure to love.
The second and much more interesting presentation was the one today where the id Software staff had a discussion with the press and Quakecon attendees on various aspects of the game itself. This part was done live with the id staff playing the game in real time while describing the new features and showing them off. There was a lot of material that I will simply be leaving out, so if you want every detail of this, check your favorite gaming sites or ShackNews.
A couple of things that stood out to me during the demonstration were the per pixel collision system. This basically means that bullets that the player fires are coded so as to test for collision with each individual pixel. This allows you to do things like shoot between the legs of an oncoming zombie or in between to shelves to an enemy beyond. This is a big difference from what we are seeing in most other modern games. Also there was a part of the demo where one id staff member knocked a zombie down, and then stood on him, preventing him from getting up. It was a humorous scene with the zombie attempting to sit up only to be pushed back down by the weight of the player.
The new physics engine that I mentioned earlier is also vastly different than I have seen anywhere else. No longer will you see people and bodies hanging off the ledges if they have been killed; now you will see them fall in all their glory! The demonstration of this was when id killed a zombie above a staircase making the dead body fall onto the top of the stairs and start to slowly bounce down them. When the body stopped half way down, shooting it again got its momentum going until it had bounced to the bottom and rolled over on its back. Gruesome for sure, but very accurately portrayed.
Also with the new physics engine is a new lighting engine. All the shadows in the world that are cast by or on moving objects are now completely dynamic and change with the world around it. You can now accidentally shoot out the lights in a small room only to leave yourself in complete darkness and open to attack. So be careful!
The map editor and scripting system will make the modifiers for first-person shooters drool in the ability to customize the game to your own designs. And you can even have the ability to edit the sound system in real time during a map construction process.
After the Doom III demos, we were graced with a keynote from the man himself, John Carmack. The one hour speech and one hour Q&A had more detail than I care to present to you in full, but I’ll touch on what I felt was interesting or important. First, he mentioned several times that the Doom III engine was based and built around the technology that became available on the first generation of GeForce 1 cards. While this makes sense as developing a game engine takes longer than most expect, the idea of running Doom III on a GF1 is laughable! His current guess was that recommend requirements were going to be a 1 GHz processor; but after discussion, most of the other press editors and myself think that even this may be too low an estimate.
John also did slip in the news that Doom III was going to be ported to the Xbox soon after the PC launch.
If any of you were expecting to have a 64-bit, dual processor Opteron Doom III setup running, you had better cancel that 64-bit part. John Carmack says that offering the users a 64-bit version of the Doom III engine would not benefit the gamers at all, but would actually slow down performance slightly because the memory addresses for the additional 32-bits are longer and take longer read and write. Multiprocessing support will be built into the Doom III engine, as it originally was with the Quake III engine. Carmack also said that Linux and Mac OS X port were going to happen, but that basically you must have an NVIDIA chipset card for either of those operating systems to run Doom III correctly.
