Interview

ATI-News: Please introduce yourself and what position you have at FutureMark Corp.?

Nick: My name is Nicklas Renqvist, and I work at Futuremark as the Customer & Media Relations Specialist and also produce sound effects for our products.

ATI-News: How long have you worked for Futuremark (aka MadOnion)?

Nick: I joined the team back in 2000, so I have been working here for over 4 years.

ATI-News: What game are you currently playing?

Nick: I haven’t had that much time to play games lately, but FarCry was impressive and BattleField is still one of my all-time favourite online games.

ATI-News: What’s your opinion about Far Cry and DOOM 3?

Nick: Both games are extremely cool and I think they both have raised the bar in real-time 3D graphics on the PC. I have played FarCry, but haven’t finished it yet. I still want to complete the game, though I have no idea when I will find some spare time to do it. DOOM 3 is a very nice game too, but I have never really liked games where the player is thrown in some small rooms and narrow corridors with no lights on. Too scary stuff for me! J But still, it is a really nice game both artistically and technically. I bet that DOOM 3 and FarCry will be the games everyone will compare to when other games will be released later on.

ATI-News: The use of the 3DMark03 has become a highly disputed topic of discussion in the past. What’s your stance about it? + What are you going to do to change this problem?

Nick: We really need to focus on where we are at the moment. There were some discussions around 3DMark03 last year, but at the moment everything is back to normal. By following the benchmark guidelines and using 3DMark03 approved drivers, 3DMark03 gives you reliable and perfectly comparable results. We will continue to approve drivers for both 3DMark03 and 3DMark05 in order to ensure that there are no application specific optimizations that could jeopardize the results’ validity.

ATI-News: What’s your opinion on the Pixel Shader 2.0b and Pixel Shader 3.0? Where are the differences and where do you see benefits?

Nick: I think that the new shader models will be used in many future games. As far as I know, no game has shipped (to this date) with support for either of those two PS versions, but there is no reason why games wouldn’t do so in the future. If I recall correctly, there will be (or has been released) a patch for FarCry which use SM3.0. Not sure about PS2.b though.

One of the benefits in those two shader models is of course that you can do longer shaders in one pass. It will let the developers really come up with some amazing stuff, and still maintain acceptable frame rates.

The biggest difference between the PS2.b and PS3.0 is of course that the PS3.0 brings a bunch of new shader instructions, whereas the PS2.b basically just allows longer shaders using the PS2.0 instruction set.