John Carmack Testifies That ATI Has The Technology Lead - Doom III!

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Msnbc.com's Steve Kent has had the chance to talk too id Software co-founder John Carmack and Tim Willits about Doom III. Here's a byte from his interview:

According to Carmack, the man who designed the game engines for the various versions of Castle Wolfenstein 3Ds, Dooms, and Quakes, the startlingly realistic environs of Doom III were not possible until new developments in computer hardware opened the proverbial door.

Doom III is very much hardware driven, and one of the controversies of this year?s E3 was that the game was demonstrated on the latest ATI graphics card rather than a card from NVidia.

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"NVidia has been stellar in terms of driver quality and support and doing all of the things right," said Carmack, who has been an outspoken evangelist for Nvidia's GeForce technology. "For the past few years, they have been able to consistently outplay ATI on every front. The problem is that they are about one-half step out of synch with the hardware generation because they did Xbox instead of focusing everything on their next board. So they are a little bit behind ATI."
"I told everyone that I was going to demonstrate Doom III on the best hardware, and there has been no collusion or kickbacks or anything like that going on. Our objective is the technical merit."
"The new ATI card was clearly superior. I don't want to ding Nvidia for anything because Nvidia has done everything they possibly could; but in every test we ran, ATI was faster." John Carmack Testifies That ATI Has The Technology Lead - Doom III