Just back from MacWorld Tokyo, id Software's lead programmer, John Carmack has updated his .plan file with a long analysis of the newly announced Geforce 3 from NVIDIA:

Here is a dump on the GeForce 3 that I have been seriously working
with for a few weeks now:

The short answer is that the GeForce 3 is fantastic. I haven't had such an
impression of raising the performance bar since the Voodoo 2 came out, and
there are a ton of new features for programmers to play with.

Graphics programmers should run out and get one at the earliest possible
time. For consumers, it will be a tougher call. There aren't any
applications our right now that take proper advantage of it, but you should
still be quite a bit faster at everything than GF2, especially with
anti-aliasing. Balance that against whatever the price turns out to be.

While the Radeon is a good effort in many ways, it has enough shortfalls
that I still generally call the GeForce 2 ultra the best card you can buy
right now, so Nvidia is basically dethroning their own product.

It is somewhat unfortunate that it is labeled GeForce 3, because GeForce
2 was just a speed bump of GeForce, while GF3 is a major architectural
change. I wish they had called the GF2 something else.

We moved to C++ for the current game (which does not have an official full name yet).

I will probably do a .plan update about it, because it has definately had its pros and cons.

Jim Dose had inadvertantly used a few MS specific idioms that we had to weed out over the past couple weeks of the bring up on OS-X.

We did a ton of testing the last two weeks while we were putting the demo together.

The 733 G4 was not as fast as my 1 ghz PIII in any of the trouble areas.

Apple is doing a lot of good work, but the CPU's just aren't as fast as the x86 ones.

AltiVec can compensate in some cases, because it is way, way easier to program for than SSE, but it takes a very simple batched, computation intensive task for it to pay off in any noticable way. Amdahls law and all that.

We did a couple functions with AltiVec, but they didn't make much difference.

Video encoding and large image processing are two areas that it can pay off, because you may be spending 90%+ of your time in one page of code.

Even then, it takes a special balance to let a G4 come out ahead, because it has less memory bandwidthd than a high end x86 system.

Carmack's Slashdot.org Posts

NVIDIA

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Carmack's Geforce 3 .plan file

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