ATI Releases Competition for NVIDIA's Cg

death00 writes "ATI has released a beta of RenderMonkey, their suite of open, extensible shader development tools. ATI showed these tools for the first time at Siggraph 2002. Should be interesting to see who wins the shader development race, NVIDIA's Cg, RenderMonkey or whatever 3Dlabs has on the go."

Comments

And the winner is...

[javilon]

"Should be interesting to see who wins the shader development race, NVIDIA's Cg, RenderMonkey or whatever 3Dlabs has on the go."

Or maybe nobody wins. Maybe three uncompatible ways to do things will hurt developers.
What they should be doing is to reach an agreement and put it onto opengl.

Re:And the winner is...

[j1mmy]

The 3Dlabs proposal is actually for extending OpenGL with a C-like shader language, and it looks pretty clever.

Re:And the winner is...

[Cyberdyne]

Or maybe nobody wins. Maybe three uncompatible ways to do things will hurt developers.

You mean like:

Mac vs Windows vs Linux?

Yep. The biggest hurdle for Linux and the Mac is Windows compatibility - hence SoftWindows/SoftPC, Wine, VMWare, Bochs, Win4Lin - not to mention cross-platform systems like Java, HTML etc, all designed to circumvent this problem.

Remember what (almost) killed Unix in the first place? Fragmentation. Each Unix vendor adding their own little "features", making cross-platform support a little harder each time. If they'd been able to agree on a single "Unix" rather than each going their own way, we could all be using commodity Unix boxes interchangeably.

Or maybe:

Gnome vs KDE vs Motif?

Yes, another case in point: this is a big PITA for developers - and, again, something the original Unix people avoided like the plague. You were supposed to have "a window manager" - it doesn't matter which, they all use the same protocol, and are all interchangeable. Now, we have a nightmare of rival libraries, doing the same thing in different ways.

One of the greatest advantages Windows has is uniformity - for users and developers alike. With very few exceptions, a 7 year-old Windows 95 (Win32) application will run perfectly happily on Windows XP; even old DOS applications from 20 years ago will usually run, unless they access low-level things directly. Meanwhile, adding items to the Programs menu hasn't even remained consistent within Gnome, let alone between Gnome, KDE and others; as I type this, CodeWeavers are still trying to update Crossover to support Gnome 2's new approach.

Or how about:

rpm vs apt-get vs pkg?

apt-get and rpm work very nicely as a team, so that's hardly a good example...

Haven't you ever wondered why so much effort goes into standards - the IETF with RFCs, the Single Unix Spec, POSIX, W3C, Linux Standards Base...?

Apples vs. Oranges ?

[tandr]

NVIDIA's Cg is a compiler to create shaders.

ATI's Rendermonkey is Toolkit to debug (low-level?) shaders. I did not find any word about "compiler" on ATI's site.

It is more like they are extending each other -- ATI gives IDE, NVIDIA provides compiler.

What does that look like on your CV?

[brejc8]

Experience in C, C++, x86 Assembler, Cg, Render Monkey, Will work for peanuts.

Its sort of like evolution...

[thelinuxking]

Except its backwards...First they have RenderMan, then RenderMonkey.

Re:Render Monkey?

[fataugie]

So is the debugger called SpankTheMonkey?

monkey

[!splut]

Well, if we go on the basis of clever names, ATI wins hands down. Plus, monkeys have always made me think of high quality shaders.

Re:co-operate

[MikeTheYak]

Perhaps because the shareholders own the corporations, and corporations are chartered to serve the interests of the shareholders? Imagine if you owned a store, only to find that the employees were giving away your stock to charity. Sure it would be a nice gesture, but it's not exactly the right thing to do.

You could argue that it would be in the shareholders' best interest that ATi and nVidia cooperate on a standard, but it would be unethical for either corporation to deliberately flaunt the interests of the shareholders.

Re:Competition is always a good thing

[PainKilleR-CE]

Personally, I've been pretty upset with NVIDIA ever since they bought out 3dfx and told Voodoo owners to go screw themselves, that they weren't releasing any new drivers or supporting any Voodoo products. I bought a Voodoo5, instead of a Geforce2 - due to the stability of the Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 I had owned, and due to reading the complaints about NVIDIA's drivers... and a week later 3dfx went under. D'OH!

nVidia didn't really 'buy out' 3dfx, they just bought up certain portions of their technology when 3dfx went under. As for complaints about nVidia's drivers, I'd be interested to know what they were at that time, since I dumped 3dfx for nVidia when the Voodoo3 made it extremely clear that 3dfx was not going to be able to produce cards comparable to the Voodoo and Voodoo2 on nVidia's timeline. Through the TNT lines and GeForce lines the only problems I've had with drivers have been specific to particular games and particular driver versions, and fixed very quickly in most cases.

Re:Haha, you are in for a BIG suprise

[dinivin]

Even if ATI releases a superior part they just shoot themselves in the foot by releasing shitty drivers on an unpredictable schedule.

That was true in the past, but I haven't had a single issue with either my original 64 Meg Radeon, my Radeon 7500, or my Radeon 8500. I really wish people would stop living in the past and realize that ATI has dramatically improved their driver support in the past year.

Dinivin

Not competing

[Namarrgon]

Except they're not really in competition to each other.

- Cg is a high-level shading language (compatible with DirectX 9's HLSL) that will compile to both DirectX and OpenGL APIs, or to various sets of OpenGL extensions, even at runtime if desired.

- Render Monkey is an IDE that supports various shading languages, including Microsoft's (and therefore Cg, at least when they add DX9 support). AFAIK, it's not that dissimilar to nVidia's own Effects Browser.

- OpenGL 2.0 is a lot more than just a shading language, but in any case, it's still at the proposal stage. Cg may yet be adopted for the language, but it will likely end up being quite similar at least.

So I see no reason why you couldn't write your shaders in Cg (sorry, DX9 HLSL) within the RenderMonkey environment, and then compile your results to OpenGL 2.0.

nVidia have said they'll support whatever the ARB decides, but even if OpenGL 2.0 does use the 3DLabs language, there's no particular reason you couldn't use a Cg profile to output an OpenGL 2.0 HL shader, or an ARB_vertex_program shader, or something even lower-level.

Hell, why not just write your shaders in RenderMan & then use RenderMonkey or Effects Browser or whatever to import the RIBs & compile that down. Ever wondered why nVidia bought Exluna? There's a lot of RenderMan expertise right there...

Re:Not competing

[Forkenhoppen]

Effects Browser requires that you write the plugin as you usually would, compile, and create a .dll for it, etc., and then you can view it in the Effects Browser. (From the Effects Browser you can't change anything; only view.)

With RenderMonkey, you don't worry about C/C++ at all. All of the settings (constants, input textures, etc.) for the shader are nicely displayed on the left, and you can just click and change them as you wish. This is absolutely nothing like NVidia's Effects Browser.