[willis936]

I can tell you that the fact that id tech 6 engine games look as good as they do and pump out 200+ fps is pretty novel in a way that the massive epic games and their flagship UE5 (and no painstakingly optimized case studies one may conjure) come close to matching even a decade on. The reward for lapping the entire industry? Early retirement.

[ahartmetz]

I have also been very impressed by the performance and fluidity of Doom and Doom Eternal. Even when playing from a HDD (on a computer made from leftover parts), when high res textures and geometry didn't load fast enough, the engine just showed a low res version before smoothly blending to higher res without ever stuttering. It's a minor miracle how well these games run, even on GPUs 2-3 tiers lower than most others require.

[midnightclubbed]

id tech is probably the last engine that used a signature game to showcase the engine to licensees. The business model of idTech, Unreal Engine, and Crytech used to be 'make amazing looking game that sells the engine to licensees'. The problem with that model was you got a cut of the game code for whatever the 'amazing looking' game was and told to figure it out. If you wanted to make a Gears of War clone then Unreal Engine 3 was perfect... for every other game genre you had to rewrite and implement huge chunks of code.

Unreal Engine managed to evolve and expand the engine to the point where it is somewhat game agnostic, crytech became lumberyard under Amazon and died, idTech became the engine solely for iD games (ie the same business model as every other game or publisher custom engine).

iD tech's rendering pipeline is focussed on the one AA game iD are publishing that year and making that one game run efficiently and beautifully on mid-high end PC and current consoles. UE5 is focussed on providing tools for anyone to (relatively) easily make good looking games and applications that can be published to a wide range of devices.

[danbolt]

I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages. I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier.

Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.

[midnightclubbed]

For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy.

The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

[flohofwoe]

> The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

...which is a good thing tbh. No game needs hundreds or thousands of custom materials.

[cyber_kinetist]

I think it can actually be a bit better in terms of artistic consistency to have a fixed set of materials you can work with in a given game. Very important if you want any sort of stylized rendering!

[WillPostForFood]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6#Games_using_id_Tech_...

It may have been great, and lapped the entire industry, but it wasn't getting used very much, even internally at Microsoft. So how much value was really bringing?

[canelonesdeverd]

"How much value can this bring?" Is the question that the incompetents at microslop needed to ask themselves before absorbing half the industry, not the smug justification for killing great tech after failing to capitalize on it. Specially when it brought great value to the industry for decades.