"The performance was really disappointing for the first 256 bit DDR card. I tried to set up a "poster child" case that would stress the memory subsystem above and beyond any driver or triangle level inefficiencies, but I was unable to get it to ever approach the performance of a GF4."

"The 10 bit color framebuffer is nice, but Doom needs more than 2 bits of destination alpha when a card only has four texture units, so we can't use it. Anti aliasing features are nice, but it isn't all that fast in minimum feature mode, so nobody is going to be turning on AA. The same goes for "surround gaming". While the framerate wouldn't be 1/3 the base, it would still probably be cut in half."

their implementation of hardware displacement mapping is NOT quad based. I was thinking about a certain other companies proposed approach. Matrox's implementation actually looks quite good, so even if we don't use it because of the geometry amplification issues, I think it will serve the noble purpose of killing dead any proposal to implement a quad based solution.

I didn't speak to ATI for months after they gave me a beta 8500 board last year with drivers that rendered the console incorrectly. :-)

I was duly impressed when the P10 just popped right up with full functional support for both the fallback ARB_ extension path (without specular highlights), and the NV10 NVidia register combiners path. I only saw two issues that were at all incorrect in any of our data, and one of them is debatable. They don't support NV_vertex_program_1_1, which I use for the NV20 path, and when I hacked my programs back to 1.0 support for testing, an issue did show up, but still, this is the best showing from a new board from any company other than Nvidia.

Given the good first impression, I was willing to go ahead and write a new back end that would let the card do the entire Doom interaction rendering in a single pass. The most expedient sounding option was to just use the Nvidia extensions that they implement, NV_vertex_program and NV_register_combiners, with seven texture units instead of the four available on GF3/GF4. Instead, I decided to try using the prototype OpenGL 2.0 extensions they provide.