Slo-Tech has posted their really interesting interview with Richard Huddy, ATI's European Developer Relations Manager. The interview covers ATI's success with the R3xx core, small vendor DX 9 hardware, driver development, VR headsets [:-)], DirectX and OpenGL API's and a whole lot more: Slo-Tech: Could you tell us what are perhaps 3 most common mistakes that game developers are making and how they affect performance or visual quality? Richard Huddy: First of all, nine out of ten games under-use the graphics card. That's amazing, and it's been true for the last three or four years. With the future generations of graphics hardware that I've been talking about in response to the last question the situation will be corrected. Then it suddenly becomes easier to use the power of the hardware because the hardware, the artist and the programmer all 'think' in the same terms. Secondly not enough games take advantage of the power of the shaders which are available now. We're still having to work hard to push games developers to move from writing pixel shader assembler to HLSL (Microsoft's High Level Shading Language which is new to DirectX 9) or GL2 (which is OpenGL's high level shading language). And thirdly almost every games developer I know drinks too much caffeine and works too many hours in the ordinary working day. We need to work smarter not harder. Using the high level shading languages are a major part of this, but generally the life of a games developer is pretty tough.
Slo-Tech: What could (should) game developers push more on current generation hardware? More triangles, bigger textures,...? Richard Huddy: Bigger textures only help if the textured objects can get _really_ close to the player. And more polygons usually only improve the silhouette of an object. Most game developers get these things about right these days... The thing they should push harder is their artists. If the programmers showed the artists how much could be done with modern shader hardware then the artists could really start using their hidden creativity. I'm also disappointed that quite a few games still don't allow the player to enable anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is such a big quality win that I recommend that if a game is running on DirectX 9 hardware then it should enable anti-aliasing by default. Slo-Tech: Games are obviously quite far behind graphics cards technology. How do you think will Doom 3 affect this considering that it looks like there will be graphics cards capable of running it in 100 fps range when the game ships? Richard Huddy: Doom 3 won't require anything more than DX8 class hardware to run the game, and while there's no doubt that it'll be a tremendous game a great success there are several other games that I'm also looking forward to this year. Top of my list are Half Life 2 from Valve, and Far Cry from Crytek. Both look amazingly good and they take the outdoor games engines to a whole new level. And Doom3 will still not run at 100's of frames a second if you crank up the anti-aliasing settings, enable anisotropic texture filtering and run at the highest resolutions. We still have plenty more raw power to deliver to make that happen. Richard Huddy Interview
Slo-Tech: What could (should) game developers push more on current generation hardware? More triangles, bigger textures,...? Richard Huddy: Bigger textures only help if the textured objects can get _really_ close to the player. And more polygons usually only improve the silhouette of an object. Most game developers get these things about right these days... The thing they should push harder is their artists. If the programmers showed the artists how much could be done with modern shader hardware then the artists could really start using their hidden creativity. I'm also disappointed that quite a few games still don't allow the player to enable anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is such a big quality win that I recommend that if a game is running on DirectX 9 hardware then it should enable anti-aliasing by default. Slo-Tech: Games are obviously quite far behind graphics cards technology. How do you think will Doom 3 affect this considering that it looks like there will be graphics cards capable of running it in 100 fps range when the game ships? Richard Huddy: Doom 3 won't require anything more than DX8 class hardware to run the game, and while there's no doubt that it'll be a tremendous game a great success there are several other games that I'm also looking forward to this year. Top of my list are Half Life 2 from Valve, and Far Cry from Crytek. Both look amazingly good and they take the outdoor games engines to a whole new level. And Doom3 will still not run at 100's of frames a second if you crank up the anti-aliasing settings, enable anisotropic texture filtering and run at the highest resolutions. We still have plenty more raw power to deliver to make that happen. Richard Huddy Interview
