[bbot]

According to the Inquirer, Farcry supports shader 3.0, which r420 doesn't support. Haha. So much for ATI's efforts to deemphasize shader 3.0.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15442

PS Talking about ATI, does anyone know what design teams are working on what vpus?

[anaqer]

Duck season! Rabbit season! Duck season! Troll season!

[jolle]

at NV40 launch the Crytech guy refered to everything as "PS2.0 and PS3.0" was necessary..
Which leads us to belive that the "SM3.0 mod" is nothing but content update with SM3.0 support..
not SM3.0 exclusive.. you just dont want to run it on "todays" PS2.0 hardware..
Altho running it in PS2.0 on R420 is prolly very possible at similar rates and visuals as NV40 in PS3.0..

So its more a content update to use the overall speed improvments on the new generation.. seeminly..

Devs do most likly use both ATI and Nvidia hardware in development, if they fail to make their games run well on one of them, they will sell less games..
That is why Valve was annoyed at the problems with NV3x, they want everyone to be able to run their game well, and that means extra work for them if the hardware isnt doing that with standard implementations..

[Dave Baumann]

The questions is: is there any difference between the PS2.0 and PS3.0 paths?

As for who's working on what, yes, I know, but you'll have to wait for the answer.

[Ante P]

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

The questions is: is there any difference between the PS2.0 and PS3.0 paths?

As for who's working on what, yes, I know, but you'll have to wait for the answer.

huh you've been able to run Far Cry with SM3.0?
sorry if I'm being daft, haven't slept for 30-40 hours or so

[Dave Baumann]

No, I'm asking.

[Doomtrooper]

How many times does the Crytek guy state can be only be possbile on SM 2.0 and SM 3.0 .


http://home.comcast.net/~tdwitzke/103_0372.avi
http://home.comcast.net/~tdwitzke/103_0373.avi

[jolle]

A guess would be that visually they will be the same on NV40 and R420...
Unless there is something they found to cost alot of peformance in PS2.0 but could be done with only a small impact in SM3.0..
what that would be, someone who knows alot about it could prolly give a educated guess on that..

Softer shadowedges maybe?
all trees seem to have realtime volumetric shadows here..

[Evildeus]

I thought it wasn't possible for the moment cos:
- 6800(U) is still recognized as an NV3*
- DX9c still not here (not sure this one is important as SM3.0 is already in DX9)
- Drivers are a bit shabby.

[jolle]

Originally Posted by Evildeus

I thought it wasn't possible for the moment cos:
- 6800(U) is still recognized as an NV3*
- DX9c still not here (not sure this one is important as SM3.0 is already in DX9)
- Drivers are a bit shabby.

The cards arent out on the market yet, the "SM3.0 mod" isnt either..
but the 1.1 patch did say "added support for PS3.0"..
which wont be exposed without DX9.0c from what Ive heard..

[Evildeus]

Originally Posted by Doomtrooper

How many times does the Crytek guy state can be only be possbile on SM 2.0 and SM 3.0 .


http://home.comcast.net/~tdwitzke/103_0372.avi
http://home.comcast.net/~tdwitzke/103_0373.avi

Yeah, but i thought it depends on what you are using in SM3.0. Farcry seems to use only performance enhancement, whereas some parts of SM3.0 are not doable in SM2.0. Correct me if i'm wrong

[Dave Baumann]

Long shaders can be achieved via multipass, branched shaders can be unravelled. Does the SM3.0 patch for Far Cry even include either long shader or branching though?

[Evildeus]

I thought some fonction weren't possible in SM 2.0... I'm wrong it seems.

It would be great if one of the dev on B3D board could do some tester comparing the same effect using SM 2.0 and SM 3.0, to see where it goes.

[Bry]

According to the guy from Crytek at the 8600 launch..he said and I will try to quote as much as I can

These new enhancmements can be performed on SM2.0 and Sm3.0 given the power of the hardware

To take that quote in its literal terms. He was saying as long as you have hardware that is powerful enough, you will be able to see these new enhancments wether your are using SM2.0 or Sm3.0. I can see no other way to interpret that, unless someone can enlighten me..

I also take it to understand that current hardware (R3XX/N3X) Is not powerfull enough thus why it was not released earlier.

[jolle]

Originally Posted by Evildeus

I thought some fonction weren't possible in SM 2.0... I'm wrong it seems.

It would be great if one of the dev on B3D board could do some tester comparing the same effect using SM 2.0 and SM 3.0, to see where it goes.

Might be that somethings might cost alot more peformance to do in PS2.0 then in PS3.0, dunno if there is anything that can be done with only PS3.0 tho...
But in that case, you can almost say "cant be done in PS2.0" even tho it theoreticly can but would cost to much peformance..

[MasterBaiter]

Maybe its just me, but I think supporting a feature such as SM 3.0 in current games seems a bit premature.. Seems to be a feature that we should be expecting perhaps on next years games (on the cutting edge games that is). I think it's pretty cool to see Crytek adding support for SM 3.0 though. I don't think ATI is going to lose too much sleep over not having SM 3.0 yet though (it really isn't relevant yet IMO). I"m sure the marketing section of Nvidia is really going to be beating the SM 3.0 support drum though!

P.S. bbot: you do sound kinda trollish in your post... :?

[Evildeus]

Is Floating Point Blending something possible in SM 2.0?

[Joe DeFuria]

Originally Posted by Bry

I also take it to understand that current hardware (R3XX/N3X) Is not powerfull enough thus why it was not released earlier.

I'd be willing to bet that R3xx is powerful enough, but NV3x isn't. And given that Far Cry is a WIMTBP game, that's the reason we haven't seen it released earlier.

[jolle]

I dunno, even a 9800XT is under hard pressure in Farcry on everthing high..
Add to that weight the fact that it should now render the shadow of every tree as a volumetric realtime shadow (with soft edges even i think) where as earlier those shadows were baked into texture..

[Luminescent]

I"m sure the marketing section of Nvidia is really going to be beating the SM 3.0 support drum though!

Nvidia should promote SM 3.0; it probably cost them quite a few transistors (relative to a non SM 3.0 design) ... transistors they might have used for additional performance ... performance which X800pro and X800XT have already been credited with.

[MDolenc]

Originally Posted by Evildeus

Is Floating Point Blending something possible in SM 2.0?

Blending doesn't have much to do with pixel shaders, so yes you can do floating point blending on PS 2.0 hardware (that supports FP blending).

[Ostsol]

Originally Posted by Evildeus

Is Floating Point Blending something possible in SM 2.0?

I don't think that's part of the shader spec. It'd be more likely to be found in the specs for floating point offscreen buffers.

[Dave Baumann]

OK. AFAIK there are no qualatitive differences between the SM3.0 and SM2.0 paths in Far Cry. The SM3.0 path does use vertex instancung whuch will improve NV4x's vertex shader performance in comparison to not using it.

[Miksu]

Noticed this at Rage3D: http://www.pclab.pl/print9725.html

Couple quotes from the original thread:

Pawel Pilarczyk was one of the guests on this conference. ATI showed more then one sceenshot of HL2, they showed lots of benchmarks based on many popular games an advantage of R420 over NV40 was huge in the moments. He can`t post any details till early May, but from what I`ve heard in Tomb Raider AOD in High Res with FSAA R420 is almost 70% faster than NV40.

farcry running at 68 fps...I wonder what resolution/AA/AF settings were being used

[991060]

I'm sure R420 can beat NV40 when the latter is using 8xAA.

Does anybody know why nVIDIA didn't implement 6xAA? Is it hard to implement or protected by ATi's patent?