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Codeplay Responds to NVidia's Cg

Posted by michael on from the my-megapixels-are-bigger-than-yours dept.

Da Masta writes "Codeplay Director Andrew Richards has some interesting things to say about NVidia's Cg graphics language. Just to refresh, Codeplay is the company that publishes Vector C, the badassed, high performance C compiler. In brief, it seems as though Cg isn't the universal, standard graphics language some pass it off to be. Certain design considerations in the language, such as the lack of integers, break/continue/goto/case/switch structures, and pointers suggest a general lack of universal usefulness. This leads to suspicion that NVidia plans to add and tailor the language in the future according to its own hardware and their respective features. Of course, this is all old news to those of us who noticed NVidia co-developed the language with the Evil Empire."

3 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Whining about competition... by kbonin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I love the line regarding Codeplay's own product: "This approach will be extended to embrace emerging new hardware features without the need of proprietary 'standards'." So, the point is: 'Don't waste your time on that competitors product, wait for us to finish ours!' Where have I heard this marketing approach before? :)

    Codeplay's VectorC is optimized around Playstation2 centric vector graphics hardware and scene graph libraries, whereas nVidia's Cg is optimized for most current PC accelerators. Most playstation developers use licensed scene graph libraries, whereas most PC game developers use custom or licensed engines over low level libraries, so both approaches are appropriate for their current customer base...

    I think its reasonable to assume Cg will evolve with its target hardware, and I'd rather nVidia do a good job with the current version than waste time hypothetical future features. I'm using Cg now, and its a great step in the right direction - a high level shader language not owned by M$ and/or tied to D3D.

    I think the biggest issue w/ Cg is how nVidia is going to address the divergence in silicon budgets between themselves and ATI - nVidia is pushing for more, faster vertex shaders, while ATI (w/ M$'s backing) is pushing for more powerful pixel shaders, i.e. D3D pixel shaders v1.4, exposed in D3D 8.1, are supported in ATI Radeon 8*, but no publically announced nVidia cards support the nicely expanded instruction set and associated capabilities. nVidia also needs to complete fragment[pixel] shader support for OpenGL (and release source or a multithreaded version of the GL runtimes...)

  2. They can program in Logo for all I care by dr_canak · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Anyone who's played games in the last two years knows that an NVidia chip is the way to go. They update their drivers on an almost weekly basis, and make all their beta's available for download as well. The On-line support is excellent, and just about every driver update seems to add a boost in performance. Add to this that their drivers are backwards compatible to at least the TNT2 chips, and I say I don't really care if they want to tout their own language, and make it propriatary to their chips. This is a company that actually survived the dotcom burst, and is continuing to thrive because they make a damn good product.

  3. Re:Goto is not a cuss word when used wisely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Indeed. The goal of good programming is to make the code readable and maintainable. If any coding practise gets in the way, do either of two things:
    1) rewrite the sections
    2) break the rule

    If the code section is long, but any functional section fits on a page, then the code is fine. If goto helps keep the code clean (rather than nested if's, or shedloads of small function calls), then use it.

    Rules are there to make you think before you break them.