John Carmack, president of id Software, made a lengthy update to his .plan file comparing the performance of ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro (R300) and NVIDIA's GeForce FX (NV30) in DOOM III. He also talks about the evolution of the OpenGL and Direct X APIs, as well as the future of graphics cards. While the discussion is quite technical, Carmack breaks it down for the non-technical folk:

I am using an NV30 in my primary work system now, largely so I can test more of the rendering paths on one system, and because I feel Nvidia still has somewhat better driver quality (ATI continues to improve, though). For a
typical consumer, I don't think the decision is at all clear cut at the moment.

For developers doing forward looking work, there is a different tradeoff -- the NV30 runs fragment programs much slower, but it has a huge maximum instruction count. I have bumped into program limits on the R300 already.

As always, better cards are coming soon.

John Carmack .plan Update

id Software

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