Newsgroup: it.fan.studio-vit
Titolo: I cospiratori di Doom

Queste sono le dichiarazioni ufficiali rilasciate nei giorni scorsi da
John Carmack:
"Well, this is going to be an interesting .plan update.
Most of this is not really public business, but if some things aren't 
stated explicitly, it will reflect unfairly on someone.
As many people have heard discussed, there was quite a desire to remake 
DOOM as our next project after Q3. Discussing it brought an almost 
palpable thrill to most of the employees, but Adrian had a strong enough
dislike for the idea that it was shot down over and over again.
Design work on an alternate game has been going on in parallel with the 
mission pack development and my research work.
Several factors, including a general lack of enthusiasm for the proposed 
plan, the warmth that Wolfenstien was met with at E3, and excitement 
about what we can do with the latest rendering technology were making it
seem more and more like we weren't going down the right path.
I discussed it with some of the other guys, and we decided that it was 
important enough to drag the company through an unpleasant fight over it.
An ultimatum was issued to Kevin and Adrian (who control >50% of the 
company): We are working on DOOM for the next project unless you fire us.
Obviously no fun for anyone involved, but the project direction was 
changed, new hires have been expedited, and the design work has begun.
It wasn't planned to announce this soon, but here it is: We are working 
on a new DOOM game, focusing on the single player game experience, and 
using brand new technology in almost every aspect of it. That is all we 
are prepared to say about the game for quite some time, so don't push 
for interviews. We will talk about it when things are actually built, 
to avoid giving misleading comments.
It went smoother than expected, but the other shoe dropped yesterday.
Kevin and Adrian fired Paul Steed in retaliation, over my opposition.
Paul has certainly done things in the past that could be grounds for 
dismissal, but this was retaliatory for him being among the 
"conspirators".
I happen to think Paul was damn good at his job, and that he was going 
to be one of the most valuable contributors to DOOM.
We need to hire two new modeler/animator/cinematic director types. 
If you have a significant commercial track record in all three areas, 
and consider yourself at the top of your field, send your resume to 
Kevin Cloud. ( mailto:
kev...@idsoftware.com
 )"
[John Carmack]
-- 
-S+E
[ Perche' tanto odio? ]

 wrote in message
bs88h8...@localhost.localdomain...


 hey monty, copiaincolla anche il plan precedente, che era un figata
Quello sulle schede video? :)
E' piu' di tua competenza ma va bene:
I have gotten a lot of requests for comments on the latest crop of video
cards, so here is my initial technical evaluation. We have played with
some early versions, but this is a paper evaluation. I am not in a position
to judge 2D GDI issues or TV/DVD issues, so this is just 3D commentary.
Nvidia
Marketing silliness: saying "seven operations on a pixel" for a dual 
texture chip. Yes, I like NV_register_combiners a lot, but come on...
The DDR GeForce is the reining champ of 3D cards. Of the shipping boards,
it is basically better than everyone at every aspect of 3D graphics, and
pioneered some features that are going to be very important: signed pixel
math, dot product blending, and cubic environment maps.
The GeForce2 is just a speed bumped GeForce with a few tweaks, but that's
not a bad thing. Nvidia will have far and away the tightest drivers for 
quite some time, and that often means more than a lot of new features in
the real world.
The nvidia register combiners are highly programmable, and can often save
a rendering pass or allow a somewhat higher quality calculation, but on 
the whole, I would take ATI's third texture for flexibility.
Nvidia will probably continue to hit the best framerates in benchmarks 
at low resolution, because they have flexible hardware with geometry 
acceleration and well-tuned drivers.
GeForce is my baseline for current rendering work, so I can 
wholeheartedly recommend it.
ATI
Marketing silliness: "charisma engine" and "pixel tapestry" are silly 
names for vertex and pixel processing that are straightforward 
improvements over existing methods. Sony is probably to blame for 
starting that.
The Radeon has the best feature set available, with several advantages 
over GeForce:
A third texture unit per pixel
Three dimensional textures
Dependent texture reads (bump env map)
Greater internal color precision.
User clip planes orthogonal to all rasterization modes.
More powerful vertex blending operations.
The shadow id map support may be useful, but my work with shadow buffers 
have shown them to have significant limitations for global use in a game.
On paper, it is better than GeForce in almost every way except that it is
limited to a maximum of two pixels per clock while GeForce can do four. 
This comes into play when the pixels don't do as much memory access, for 
example when just drawing shadow planes to the depth/stencil buffer, or 
when drawing in roughly front to back order and many of the later pixels 
depth fail, avoiding the color buffer writes.
Depending on the application and algorithm, this can be anywhere from
basically no benefit when doing 32 bit blended multi-pass, dual texture
rendering to nearly double the performance for 16 bit rendering with
compressed textures. In any case, a similarly clocked GeForce(2) should
somewhat outperform a Radeon on today's games when fill rate limited. 
Future games that do a significant number of rendering passes on the 
entire world may go back in ATI's favor if they can use the third texture 
unit, but I doubt it will be all that common.
The real issue is how quickly ATI can deliver fully clocked production 
boards, bring up stable drivers, and wring all the performance out of the 
hardware. This is a very different beast than the Rage128. I would 
definitely recommend waiting on some consumer reviews to check for 
teething problems before upgrading to a Radeon, but if things go well, 
ATI may give nvidia a serious run for their money this year.
3DFX
Marketing silliness: Implying that a voodoo 5 is of a different class 
than a voodoo 4 isn't right. Voodoo 4 max / ultra / SLI / dual / quad or 
something would have been more forthright.
Rasterization feature wise, voodoo4 is just catching up to the original 
TNT. We finally have 32 bit color and stencil. Yeah.
There aren't any geometry features.
The T buffer is really nothing more than an accumulation buffer that is
averaged together during video scanout. This same combining of separate
buffers can be done by any modern graphics card if they are set up for it
(although they will lose two bits of color precision in the process). At
around 60 fps there is a slight performance win by doing it at video scann
out time, but at 30 fps it is actually less memory traffic to do it 
explicitly. Video scan tricks also usually don't work in windowed modes.
The real unique feature of the voodoo5 is subpixel jittering during
rasterization, which can't reasonably be emulated by other hardware. This
does indeed improve the quality of anti-aliasing, although I think 3dfx 
might be pushing it a bit by saying their 4 sample jittering is as good 
as 16 sample unjittered.
The saving grace of the voodoo5 is the scalability. Because it only uses 
SDR ram, a dual chip Voodoo5 isn't all that much faster than some other 
single chip cards, but the quad chip card has over twice the pixel fill 
rate of the nearest competitor. That is a huge increment. Voodoo5 6000 
should win every benchmark that becomes fill rate limited.
I haven't been able to honestly recommend a voodoo3 to people for a long
time, unless they had a favorite glide game or wanted early linux Xfree 
4.0 3D support. Now (well, soon), a Voodoo5 6000 should make all of 
today's games look better than any other card. You can get over twice as 
many pixel samples, and have them jittered and blended together for 
anti-aliasing.
It won't be able to hit Q3 frame rates as high as GeForce, but if you 
have a high end processor there really may not be all that much 
difference for you between 100fps and 80fps unless you are playing 
hardcore competitive and can't stand the occasional drop below 60fps.
There are two drawbacks: it's expensive, and it won't take advantage of 
the new rasterization features coming in future games. It probably 
wouldn't be wise to buy a voodoo5 if you plan on keeping it for two 
years.
[ John Carmack ]
