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.

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?

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: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...