We have all seen in the news recently how Intel's doctored compiler performed dramatically worse on the amd chips, but this got me to thinking... We have a lot of games where there is huge favoritism for particular hardware. This is often explained away as poor driver implementation etc, but how much of it really is that? I mean, how can a driver team get one game so perfect, and another to perform so badly? If this was just down to drivers, there would be games where both performed terribly, and both performed well, and this would happen a lot more often than it does now. I feel there are more factors than just the drivers. The question I have to ask is could the compiler have an impact on the game? Could the way the compiler is designed to optimize the code, have different positive and negative affects due to the hardwares implementation? This seems feasible to me, but my knowledge on the subject is not big enough to make a statement about it with any degree of certainty. This question has interest to me as I am a beginner game programmer, and I want to find ways to eliminate the discrepancies due to hardware, after all, I want the people to all have an equal experience, depending on the power of the hardware, not the manufacturer. The problem is my current level of game creation (tetris clones) doesn't lend very well to me testing this myself. Is there anyone who could shed any light on the subject? Or maybe Bit-Tech could compile some of the source code available, and see what happens? I'd love to do it myself. I have got the quake 3 source code, but I've only got an Intel IGP on my laptop, I sold my main PC when I moved here to The Netherlands. Looking forward to hearing people's opinions and any testing results
As you said it's more of how they're coded, and engine differences. Look at the Doom3 Engine, it heavily favored Nvidia cards whereas the XRay engine favored ATi cards.
