Date:
Monday , October 17, 2005
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Tim Daniel
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Editorial: How Far We Have Come

The world surrounding the PC video card industry has changed greatly in the last decade. Most of it for the better...

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Bananas & Pomegranates

Now that Red and Green have learned not to cheat as badly as they used to, does the consumer see it the same way? The fact of the matter is that now the gamers and hardware enthusiasts expect to see game specific optimizations for the "big" games. You want better performance for your hard-earned money and you deserve it. Along with these optimizations, we have to realize that no two images will ever be the same now. Red and Green will never be apples to apples. They are now as different as… well, red and green. Now add into this mix totally different techniques and forms of implementing antialiasing and anisotropic texture filtering when comparing Red and Green and you end up with images that are nowhere near apples to apples even when you have the IQ quality settings set in the "same" positions. We demand AA. We demand AF. In addition, the community even demands quality optimizations for their video card. Just remember that most of these demands are going to bring along with them subtle differences at best, and easily noticeable differences at worst. In the final analysis, Red and Green are employing different technologies in order to meet the same goal.

Is it their goal to match a software-rasterized image perfectly? I don’t think so. Red and Green’s goals are similar. They want you to give them your money so that you can play video games on your computer. Therefore, you could deduce that the company’s card that gave you the "best" gameplay experience for the dollar would be the company’s video card that you want to purchase. Exactly.

The Grassy Wire Frame Knoll

In retrospect, you could say that the Web press is the one responsible for all of this driver optimization mess over the years. Had we not been so hell bent on denouncing one brand of GPU or the other because it got 4% less frames in a Quake 3 benchmark, maybe Red and Green would have paid more attention to getting it "right" rather than getting it "fast." I admit it, I was wrong to do it that way, so I stopped.

I remember spending one full weekend working on a new video card review and there happened to be a big blockbuster game just out that we were using to run time demos. A gaming buddy close to me knew this, and asked me how I liked playing the new game on Card Y. You know what? I had no idea what playing the game was like on Card Y, or Card Z for that matter. The fact of the matter was that I was about to write a video card review and tell the world which card was better for playing this new game and I had never actually played the game on either card. It was at that moment that I realized that I had been basing my opinion of the hardware on the wrong set of data. 3DMark scores don’t tell you how well your video card will play DOOM 3 or any other game. Moreover, does running automated DOOM 3 time demos tell you how well your new video card will play DOOM 3? The truth is that it will not. Furthermore, a DOOM 3 gameplay evaluation is not going to tell you how well the card plays in Half-Life 2 either. With so many optimizations and techniques extending into today’s games, the only way to tell how well a card performs in a game is to actually use it in a real game. This is now a fact in our industry. Therefore, to evaluate a video card’s gaming performance, you must run it through a myriad of gameplay that stretches across a good number of gaming genres and base your opinions on those experiences. There is no longer a quick and fast tool to tell you "which video card is best."

If we are not following the same steps that you the gamer would follow when evaluating video cards, we are just spinning our wheels. Expect to see this type of logic extended to our new [H] Consumer, [H] Console, and [H] Enterprise sites.

The Bottom Line

Is it odd that it all comes back to your gaming experience when you think about it? When it comes to video cards, your gaming experience is what counts. Is it all about who can get the most frames in a DOOM 3 or Half-Life 2 benchmark? Is it really about benchmarks noting frames per second in some game’s demo level that you have never seen and will likely not ever play? Hardly. Do you want to play the game with a certain level of immersion using hardware that will accentuate the experience of the game? Most likely. And does that hardware need to be properly supported so you can actually get to the "experience" part? Absolutely.

So as we move forward (Are we to the Benchmarking Future yet?) through this new market of computer games and supporting hardware, many of us are learning by leaps and bounds. Those that spew video card rhetoric and help bring new technology to market are still finding out that frame rates mean so little while your overall computing and gaming experience mean everything. One thing is for sure, the industry has matured greatly in just the last couple of years. We can’t wait to cover the achievements it produces in the coming years, with your experience in mind of course.

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