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The Xbox vs. PC Gaming
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad.com brought back their Face Off format to debate how the Xbox was beneficial or harmful for the PC industry. It's an interesting read with a special 3rd guest, Tim Sweeney from Epic Games, giving a few comments at the end." From the article: "The exact impact on Microsoft on the ATI/NVIDIA rivalry is difficult to know. NVIDIA received $200 million up-front from Microsoft for the Xbox. That was as much as the entire 3dfx company was worth in 1998, when the Voodoo2 was at its peak. Likewise, the original plan was for DirectX 8 to provide an API for the pixel shader in the GeForce 2 GTS. But something happened to the DirectX8 spec where all of a sudden, the minimum level of support was the GeForce 3. That something was Microsoft."
Why so?
Did you also complain when the Lord of the Rings trailers didn't mention the books?
Or when commercials home versions of arcade games don't mention that arcades had it first?
Direct X has been a PC API all along, I didn't even think XBOX games were based on it, or at least, some offshoot from it different then the PC API. As for Microsoft changing Direct X on nVidia, well, MS could do what it wants, Direct X ISN'T an industry standard, its an MS standard. Neither is OpenGL an industry standard, but OpenGL is a cross platform API which ATI and nVidia could make more robust by optimizing their drivers for it, if they wanted to. Has the XBOX really impacted PC gaming? Well, considering that the most innovative and technically advanced games are released for the PC first, I don't think so. Quake, Half-life are two rendering engines that have been ported over to XBOX games. There is so much porting of PC games to game consoles, I would suggest that the only reason why game consoles exist today is because of PC gaming. Lastely, as long as PC technology evolves and improves every 6 - 8 months while game consoles remain static for 5 - 6 years at a time, I can't say the XBOX has had any impact on PC gaming. The Xbox360 may be revolutionary today, but give it 3 - 6 months and nVidia/ATI will release a video card that outperforms the 360 by a factor of 2, followed by one a year from now by a factor of 4, etc, etc, etc until the Xbox720 or whatever.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Obviously you don't know a lot about the GeForce 2 hardware.
On the NV1x series of cards (GeForce 1, 2) and above, nVidia provided limited programability in the form of register combiners. Register combiners were exposed only through OpenGL, through the NV_register_combiners and NV_register_combiners2 extensions. They provide per-pixel shading functionality, and a programming model that's partly configuration, and partly programming. While it doesn't provide the same programming model as DirectX 8's shaders, and it's not quite as general purpose, it is very similar.
The GeForce 3 hardware also has register combiners. The only real difference with the GeForce 3 is that it had more of them, so it could do more complex per-pixel calculations than the GeForce 2 could. GeForce 3 cards actually run DirectX 8 shaders on top of those same register combiners. DirectX 8 could easily have been implemented in such as way that it'd work on a GeForce 2, by simply lowering the hardware requirements slightly (so it could be implemented on only 2 combiners). It wasn't, so the functionality is only available through DirectX on GeForce 3 hardware.
By the way, Doom 3 makes use of OpenGL vertex and fragment programs on sufficiently new hardware capable of supporting the ARB2 path. It uses them extensively for all of the lighting effects - things like specular hilights, normal mapping, and all the other stuff. It also uses them for post processing, but that's not the only (or even primary) use of them. On older hardware, it uses various other paths. The NV1x and NV2x paths both use register combiners instead of shaders to provide similar effects, and the engine was actually written (originaly) to run on GeForce 2 hardware.