Szerző: Barna József

2000. december 28. 18:35

MadOnion Q&A

A bolond hagyma mára etalonná vált a teszterek és az otthoni felhasználók körében egyaránt. Mindenki használja, de csak kevesen tudják, mi is az. Patric Ojala, a 3DMark 2001 projektvezetője segített tisztázni e roppantmód zavaró problémát... [angol nyelven]

Every year, as the end of the year is coming, everyone interested in 3D graphics is looking forward to seeing the appearance of MadOnion's new benchmark program. Their excellent 3DMark series has become a standard tool for both reviewers and home users for some years now. That is the reason why we thought it timely to ask a few questions from Patric Ojala, 3DMark2001 project manager, about their upcoming software. Patric was so kind as to answer our questions, though he carefully avoided saying too much about the particulars. Still we do hope that you will find some interesting info in the Q&A below...

Special thanks are due to Nicklas the Worm without whose help this piece would never have become a (final) reality. Also please bear in mind that the questions had been submitted before the news about the end of 3dfx arrived.

HWSW: Allow me to begin with a question, which I have been uneasy in my mind about for some time. Even after innumerable sleepless nights, I was unable to figure out what your company name 'MadOnion' means. Is it some real Finnish specialty?

Patric: We used to be named Futuremark Corporation, which is a nice name, but hardly stands out from the crowd. MadOnion.com is a name which:

  1. immediately grabs your attention
  2. you will remember
  3. is the address of our website, the heart of our company, and you will most likely spell it correctly in the address field of your web browser
Also, the onion is a symbol of our multi-layered services on our website.

HWSW: Many consumers have complained about the lack of Glide and OpenGL support in your benchmark programs. How do you see the relation between Direct3D and these APIs? Recently, Tim Sweeney - former zealous advocate of Glide - said to VoodooExtreme that Glide was dead. Is this true? Can the same be said about OpenGL as well?

Patric: We now use DirectX, because the 3D engine we use (MAX-FX by Remedy Entertainment) is built on that. Also, we see DX as one of the certain APIs of the future. Glide is limited only to 3dfx cards, which means that it is not suitable for our benchmark. OpenGL is a different issue. We have nothing against OpenGL, but it doesn't evolve as regularly as DX. It would be nice to test also OpenGL, but there is quite enough work getting a just DX benchmark out. It would require another engine, which should be licensed from somewhere or internally built, and an internally built engine would not be a genuine game engine.

HWSW: 3DMark 2000 has been heavily criticized for being biased in favor of NVIDIA chip based cards. At the same time some concerns have been raised regarding the T&L test (High Polygon Count). How do you see these claims?

Patric: In the game tests (giving the 3DMark score) we try to support only those new DX features, which have two or more supporting graphics card manufacturers, so that no single company would get an advantage in our benchmark. When 3DMark2000 was launched, it seemed like both NVIDIA and S3 would have HW T&L cards coming out in the near future. It turned out that for half a year only NVIDIA had HW T&L. Now there is also Radeon from ATi doing HW T&L, which means that it shouldn't be an issue anymore. Then again, HW T&L is a DX7 feature, so we could ask the other graphics card manufacturers why they didn't support that feature earlier.

[oldal:Q&A 4-7]

HWSW: Your 3D benchmark programs calculate the 3DMark index on the basis of the two game scenes only. Why? And do you plan to change this?

Patric: We try to keep the downloadable package small, in order to make it an attractive download also for people with slow modem connections. A game scene requires LOTS of data, therefore only two game scenes, but with many detail levels, because the detail levels make the same scene scale to a wider range of HW and we also get more tests adding less to the total file size. We plan on addressing this issue in the upcoming 3DMark2001. Stay tuned to MadOnion.com and find out how :)!

HWSW: So far the 3D effects of 3DMark have heavily utilized that MAX FX technology which will be used in the long-awaited game Max Payne. When do you think we will have a chance to see this game on retailers' shelves?

Patric: When it's done.

HWSW: If I'm not mistaken, you have always been a bit ahead of game developers with supporting 3D features in your benchmark programs; which is definitely a part of your policy to provide consumers with a possibility to roughly predict which hardware may prove to be a relatively lasting investment. In view of this, I do think that in your next-generation benchmark program you will make full use of the features of DirectX8 and SSE2. Am I mistaken?

Patric: We try to predict which features will be seen in games released in the next half a year to one year. On the other hand, we want our benchmark to be a useful tool also for people who don't have the very latest hardware. It is a bit hard to balance between these two mutually exclusive goals. We have solved this by having in the game tests (which give the 3DMark score) only those DX features, which will be most likely used in games to come. We also want the game test features to have some efficient software fallback, so that you can get a 3DMark score also with older HW. With DX8 this is harder than before, because some features are completely useless if you don't have the HW supporting them. In a game you can turn down the detail level or turn that feature off, but in our benchmark we always want to compare "apples to apples". For some new features not included in the game tests, we have made separate feature tests, like the Bump Map tests in the 3DMark versions until now.

HWSW: Especially because of its online result browser, 3DMark has become the standard of 3D benchmarking. How powerful a rig will we need to be able to enjoy 3DMark 2001 in its full pomp? Also, on the basis of your experiences and feedback from users and software developers, what will be the minimal system requirement for running a game that makes full use of DirectX 8 features?

Patric: For full functionality 3DMark2001 will require genuine DX8 graphics hardware. Some tests will be slow with a high-end system of today, but that is made on purpose. 3DMark2001 is supposed to scale with HW to be released within the next half a year to one year. If some upcoming game will support all DX8 features, you will need DX8 hardware to run it with all the visual goodies active, but as I said above, in a game you can most likely just turn off some features and still play the game.

[oldal:Q&A 8-12.33]

HWSW: Most probably because of the aggressive six-month product cycle, new video cards cost more and more, while consumers can hardly observe any real technological breakthrough (e.g. like the one the appearance of the Voodoo1 series brought about as compared to software rendering). Do you think that DirectX 8 has the potential to mark another milestone in the history of PC 3D graphics?

Patric: DX8 includes many very exciting new features, like the vertex and pixel shaders. When game developers start using these heavily, we will see some completely new stunning visuals. I doubt that it will be comparable to the introduction of hardware rasterization, but then again, I think there are so many ways to use the new DX8 features that we haven't seen yet.

HWSW: In our view, more emphasis should be laid on the scalability of game engines as well as on image quality in the future. Do not you think that simple fps benchmarks are not satisfactory anymore?

Patric: We try to offer scalability in 3DMark, by having different detail levels of the same game scene. Image quality is something that should be more emphasized, but that is harder to measure than just raw performance. We have the image quality tests in the Pro version of 3DMark2000, but that kind of testing gets harder with FSAA. The reference image should be of highest possible quality, but it is hard to define what is the perfect reference image and even harder to define what kind of deviation from the reference image is how bad?

HWSW: Are you planning on including a separate FSAA test?

Patric: Have plans for FSAA.

HWSW: When do you plan to release 3DMark2001?

Patric: When it's done.:)

HWSW: Do you have a favorite game? And do you play games often?

Patric: Personally I like playing car games and space combat simulations. The last game I was really addicted to was StarLancer, because you could play the single player continuum in multiplayer cooperative mode. Are there more space sims like that?

Dunno... I rarely play games:)

HWSW.33: Have you heard anything about Bitboys recently?

Patric: I heard they got a new manager at some point. I assume they are doing well.

Thank you.

You're welcome!

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