03-05-2004, 09:32 PM
I was looking for Doom 3 news today and I got a chuckle out of this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nzone_doom3_home.html
In short, video cards will be shipping to retailers with large stickers on them that say they can handle Doom 3. In a way it makes perfect sense, but it strikes me as funny that a single game is that influential. It would be akin to seeing a Sony boombox with "Metallica approved" stamped on the side. This makes me wonder, though... Doom 3 has been in the works since what, sometime in 2000? nVidia and ATI release new cards on a yearly basis. Who really has the most influence on the pace of technology in the GPU industry: nVidia/ATI, Microsoft, or John Carmack?
Another funny thing about Carmack... After Quake 3 was essentially finished, his team wanted to do a Doom project, but the majority ownership of Id kept shooting them down. So they made an ultimatum: do a new Doom game now or fire us. Then they did a new Doom game. I wonder if that's where the guys at Blizz got the ultimatum idea, before they all got canned.
While I'm on the Doom 3 topic, this is very old news (by now it may even be implemented in other existing games) but I think it's still pretty interesting. The Doom 3 graphics engine is always using two version of each model. The first model may have on the order of a million polygons... the kind of thing you might expect to see in a cut scene where rendering isn't done in real time. No textures are applied to these first models (good luck finding a PC to handle that), but their geometry is used to calculate things like shading and bumpmapping. Those calculations are then applied to the textures of the visible model, which is maybe a few thousands polygons. The implication here seems to be objects that will look obscenely realistic (well, this reallly has more to do with the artists than the technology though, doesn't it?) but still have obviously polygonal outlines (you can see what I mean here in any Doom 3 screenshot).
In short, video cards will be shipping to retailers with large stickers on them that say they can handle Doom 3. In a way it makes perfect sense, but it strikes me as funny that a single game is that influential. It would be akin to seeing a Sony boombox with "Metallica approved" stamped on the side. This makes me wonder, though... Doom 3 has been in the works since what, sometime in 2000? nVidia and ATI release new cards on a yearly basis. Who really has the most influence on the pace of technology in the GPU industry: nVidia/ATI, Microsoft, or John Carmack?
Another funny thing about Carmack... After Quake 3 was essentially finished, his team wanted to do a Doom project, but the majority ownership of Id kept shooting them down. So they made an ultimatum: do a new Doom game now or fire us. Then they did a new Doom game. I wonder if that's where the guys at Blizz got the ultimatum idea, before they all got canned.
While I'm on the Doom 3 topic, this is very old news (by now it may even be implemented in other existing games) but I think it's still pretty interesting. The Doom 3 graphics engine is always using two version of each model. The first model may have on the order of a million polygons... the kind of thing you might expect to see in a cut scene where rendering isn't done in real time. No textures are applied to these first models (good luck finding a PC to handle that), but their geometry is used to calculate things like shading and bumpmapping. Those calculations are then applied to the textures of the visible model, which is maybe a few thousands polygons. The implication here seems to be objects that will look obscenely realistic (well, this reallly has more to do with the artists than the technology though, doesn't it?) but still have obviously polygonal outlines (you can see what I mean here in any Doom 3 screenshot).