https://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator
This just confirms what a lot of us have been saying from the outset.
I too have programmed in both OpenGL and Direct3D, and the one thing that I am more certain of than anything else in this problem domain is that AMD (and Intel too; they also deserve a good kicking here) and OpenGL are not a happy mixture. I personally ended up tossing out a year's worth of work in an OpenGL codebase because AMD and Intel just couldn't get their acts together. That wasn't a decision made lightly and it wasn't influenced by any kind of hating on OpenGL either; the very opposite in fact - I had fully believed all of the anti-D3D propaganda up to that point. But when simple things that should work and are fully compliant with the documentation cause random crashes and mysterious slowdowns, it becomes time to start asking serious questions.
Re: the 360 version of Rage. Of course it works on AMD/ATI hardware; Rage uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA on the 360. That is one huge advantage of consoles: the end-user platform is static, stable and consistent across all machines. D3D can get a bit of this too owing to it's different driver architecture; everyone is on the same end-user runtimes. OpenGL by contrast just provides far too much leeway for drivers to screw up. (And no, the PS3 version doesn't use OpenGL either so don't try pulling that one.)
Final note here. None of this should be read as if I'm completely exonerating id for the mess. There was an obvious decision here that they failed to make, for reasons which may have seemed valid at the time but ended up doing more harm than good. Hindsight is truly wonderful. But saying "AMD OpenGL drivers are crap so don't use OpenGL if you want to run well (or at all) on AMD" doesn't invalidate the core point here, which is the "AMD OpenGL drivers are crap" bit.
This just confirms what a lot of us have been saying from the outset.
I too have programmed in both OpenGL and Direct3D, and the one thing that I am more certain of than anything else in this problem domain is that AMD (and Intel too; they also deserve a good kicking here) and OpenGL are not a happy mixture. I personally ended up tossing out a year's worth of work in an OpenGL codebase because AMD and Intel just couldn't get their acts together. That wasn't a decision made lightly and it wasn't influenced by any kind of hating on OpenGL either; the very opposite in fact - I had fully believed all of the anti-D3D propaganda up to that point. But when simple things that should work and are fully compliant with the documentation cause random crashes and mysterious slowdowns, it becomes time to start asking serious questions.
Re: the 360 version of Rage. Of course it works on AMD/ATI hardware; Rage uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA on the 360. That is one huge advantage of consoles: the end-user platform is static, stable and consistent across all machines. D3D can get a bit of this too owing to it's different driver architecture; everyone is on the same end-user runtimes. OpenGL by contrast just provides far too much leeway for drivers to screw up. (And no, the PS3 version doesn't use OpenGL either so don't try pulling that one.)
Final note here. None of this should be read as if I'm completely exonerating id for the mess. There was an obvious decision here that they failed to make, for reasons which may have seemed valid at the time but ended up doing more harm than good. Hindsight is truly wonderful. But saying "AMD OpenGL drivers are crap so don't use OpenGL if you want to run well (or at all) on AMD" doesn't invalidate the core point here, which is the "AMD OpenGL drivers are crap" bit.
To the best of my knowledge ps3 version uses open ES. Are you saying it does not?