A long time before HardOCP went and released its report on Doom 3 performance, any gamer asked would have told you that nVidia boards will perform better, justifying the response by claiming that the deal between iD and the graphics giant guarantees superior performance on nVidia based systems.
Strangely enough the HardOCP article seems to ignore the special relationship and at times seems slightly taken-in by the results produced. Recommendations that ATI needs to implement changes to its product line based on the results of the Doom 3 tests may seem a bit drastic and may be the reason ATI has decided to respond to the results obtained on the HardOCP report.
In response to an enquiry by Team Radeon, ATIs Chris Hook has suggested that since the game has not been officially released yet, we shouldn't rush to any conclusions and quickly manages to get an innuendo in, regarding nVidia's use of partial precision. He goes on to add We expect to have updated drivers available in the coming weeks. Mr. Hook clearly expects the introduction of the new drivers to play an important part in performance upgrade, although he does not mention exactly how that improvement will come about.
Chris Hook goes on to suggest that ATIs performance, although below nVidia's, is not all that bad in the HardOCP report and that even iDs John Carmack said that there's more to consider than just frame rate... ATIs man goes on to mention, again, the use of partial precision by some of our competitors... and how ATI would never ever consider using PP.
Strangely enough Mr. Hook goes on to mention that most games will run faster on ATI cards, indirectly telling us that Doom 3 is not the only game out there (Half-Life 2 is not clearly mentioned). It does sound like ATI is telling us that the frame rates produced by the article may be improved upon slightly but that we shouldn't expect much more and that we should look forward to other titles if we wish to reaffirm our belief in ATI products.
