I don't care about reducing the pass number.
The framebuffer is only 8 bits per channel at most, while pixel shader hardware has higher internal precision per channel, keeping the math in the chip as well as saving read-back from the framebuffer saves bandwidth AND improves quality.
True per-pixel phong shading looks nice, but then all they seem to do extra is allow you to vary some constants across the object via texture addresses
Pixel shaders enable arbitrary math on pixels, it isn't a fixed function phong equation with a few more variables added. Maybe an artist wants a sharp terminator, cel shading, a fresnel term, or wants a anisotropic reflection.
All these are performed using 4D SIMD math operations, just like they were in 1.1:
Add, Subtract, Multiply, Multiply-Add, Dot Product, Lerp, and Read Texture. But texture reads can happen AFTER more complex math, before there was only a few set math ops possible during a texture read. It's all in the DX8 SDK, which anyone can download.
Well that's great, but texture upload bandwidth is can already be significant bottleneck
"texture upload?" This isn't a problem, with DX8.1 cards having 64mb of memory for texture, why would developers be uploading textures per-frame? If you are talking about texture reads by the pixel shader, this also isn't a bottleneck. Reading geometry from the AGP bus is the bottleneck.
Artists won't draw bump-maps.
Sure they will, (heck, I do) look at any x-box game, they are all over the place. They won't draw in vectors-encoded-as-colors, they'll draw height maps, which would be converted off-line into normal maps.
I don't think ATI have a PS 1.0 implementation, someone please correct me if I'm wrong
1.4 hardware can support any previous version, including DX7 fixed function blend ops.
P.S.
I design hardware for this stuff, I do know what I'm talking about.
Re:Probably will be a success
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 1
>3. VIA KL133. Integrated Trident graphics. Pretty crap I reckon, pitched against i810 though so what do you expect?
Don't knock it till you try it. The CyberBlade3D core is faster and has more features than the i740 core in the 810.
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I don't care about reducing the pass number.
The framebuffer is only 8 bits per channel at most, while pixel shader hardware has higher internal precision per channel, keeping the math in the chip as well as saving read-back from the framebuffer saves bandwidth AND improves quality.
True per-pixel phong shading looks nice, but then all they seem to do extra is allow you to vary some constants across the object via texture addresses
Pixel shaders enable arbitrary math on pixels, it isn't a fixed function phong equation with a few more variables added. Maybe an artist wants a sharp terminator, cel shading, a fresnel term, or wants a anisotropic reflection.
All these are performed using 4D SIMD math operations, just like they were in 1.1: Add, Subtract, Multiply, Multiply-Add, Dot Product, Lerp, and Read Texture. But texture reads can happen AFTER more complex math, before there was only a few set math ops possible during a texture read. It's all in the DX8 SDK, which anyone can download.
Well that's great, but texture upload bandwidth is can already be significant bottleneck
"texture upload?" This isn't a problem, with DX8.1 cards having 64mb of memory for texture, why would developers be uploading textures per-frame? If you are talking about texture reads by the pixel shader, this also isn't a bottleneck. Reading geometry from the AGP bus is the bottleneck.
Artists won't draw bump-maps.
Sure they will, (heck, I do) look at any x-box game, they are all over the place. They won't draw in vectors-encoded-as-colors, they'll draw height maps, which would be converted off-line into normal maps.
I don't think ATI have a PS 1.0 implementation, someone please correct me if I'm wrong
1.4 hardware can support any previous version, including DX7 fixed function blend ops.
P.S.
I design hardware for this stuff, I do know what I'm talking about.
>3. VIA KL133. Integrated Trident graphics. Pretty crap I reckon, pitched against i810 though so what do you expect?
Don't knock it till you try it. The CyberBlade3D core is faster and has more features than the i740 core in the 810.