Few notes about Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2009

[Julius]

Bump... any news on the Wolf:ET source release?

Seems like Zenimax is not really in favour of a release?

[deanjo]

While I too would love to have a fully open source system, the drivers are still in their infancy. Full 3d support will come, but I don't think id should give up on Linux until that time.

Not sure if Rage will even still be in any other place but the bargin bin by 2013.

[Max Spain]

While I too would love to have a fully open source system, the drivers are still in their infancy. Full 3d support will come, but I don't think id should give up on Linux until that time.

[bridgman]

Bridgman you've been a HUGE champion for us Linux users with the open source drivers, and we all appreciate that. Perhaps you can help bridge a communications gap in this situation. Maybe Mr. Carmack needs some assurance from AMD/ATI's Linux driver programmers that they will help design their drivers so Rage can be run on Linux using AMD/ATI HW. If you could show this to some of the Catalyst folks maybe they could get a dialog going.

I suspect the key point from the text you quoted is :

If you are restricted to it only working on the closed source drivers, you might as well boot into windows and get the fully tested and tuned experience...

... although I don't expect many Linux users to agree with that logic

On balance it doesn't seem likely that fglrx is the pivotal issue but will ask if we can get some clarification.

[Max Spain]

Yes, it is. The codebase is much, much larger, and the graphics
technology pushes a lot of paths that are not usually optimized. It
probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the nvidia binary
drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably anywhere
else would be small. If you are restricted to it only working on the
closed source drivers, you might as well boot into windows and get the
fully tested and tuned experience...

Bridgman you've been a HUGE champion for us Linux users with the open source drivers, and we all appreciate that. Perhaps you can help bridge a communications gap in this situation. Maybe Mr. Carmack needs some assurance from AMD/ATI's Linux driver programmers that they will help design their drivers so Rage can be run on Linux using AMD/ATI HW. If you could show this to some of the Catalyst folks maybe they could get a dialog going.

[Dragonlord]

so if you cant just add more threading then what should be done?

Be smart. Brute force solutions tend to be slower than solutions with brain. A good old saying of rendering is "the fasted triangles to render are those you don't render at all". There are many tricks which reduce the work load. But here again the problem with the dated engine design I mentioned comes into play. You have to use so many tricks that you can not get them done properly and optimized in the short TTM ( time to market ) alloted to game development projects. Hence companies try to fix the shortcoming in clever design with brute force. A battle you can't win in the long run.

[deanjo]

i was going to mention that. The proof is in the clock speeds. 4.04ghz for the power 7 which isnt even out yet......

Well architecture has a lot to do with it as well, I don't think that anyone would conclude that a 3.8 Ghz Pentium 4 HT 672 is the fastest x86 processor out there still.

[L33F3R]

Then you need more brute calculating capacity. Again. Or figure out something new altogether. Some do think silicon is getting past it's expiry date...

i was going to mention that. The proof is in the clock speeds. 4.04ghz for the power 7 which isnt even out yet......

[mirv]

so if you cant just add more threading then what should be done?

That's why companies make a lot of money from licensing engines - someone else takes care of that little problem!
It seems to me that most people are going the route of pooling together a group of jobs, and then scheduling them with whatever can run them (gpgpu, cpu, whatever) - but this is still new territory, and it will take a while to sort it all out. And there's what the hardware people do as well that will help influence everything.

[nanonyme]

so if you cant just add more threading then what should be done?

Then you need more brute calculating capacity. Again. Or figure out something new altogether. Some do think silicon is getting past it's expiry date...