I have the opposite view. microsoft's specs are always below nvidia's. ati, generally doesn't add anything to ms's specs, and that's why I prefer nvidia. 2 big examples, are ati doesn't do full trilinear, the x1k series didn't have hw fp16 filtering, and couldn't do vertex texturing.Yup, deferred rendering. It's one of many, many interesting and useful rendering styles that is incompatible with the driver trying to screw with your buffers and settings behind your back. You can tell that I'm not a fan of control-panel-forced stuff (except for super-old games that predate the API flexibility to cause something like forced AA to screw up).
IMHO control panel AA, AF, "adaptive AA", LOD biasing/clamping and arguably even gamma correction on AA resolve, trilinear/aniso optimization and a host of other things have no place in DX9/10+ applications and hardware. I cannot count the number of times these things have screwed over perfectly legitimate algorithms and caused users no end of pain. Seriously, I'm grateful that Microsoft has tightened up the spec on stuff like this in DX10 and beyond.
Sometimes they're clever enough to turn themselves off when they detect an incompatible style of rendering, but that's not always possible. Still, if you force stuff from the control panel, you're completely on your own... consider yourself lucky if you game runs let alone renders properly
Not true - quite the opposite in fact. Note that NVIDIA currently has no DX10.1-supporting cards while ATI does. Now the main point here is that everyone conspires on the new DX specs, but having Microsoft involved helps to push things along and at the same time drive compatible features, which in this day and age is an absolute necessity. No one is going to ship a game that only works on one vendors graphics cards...
If you're talking about what I think you are, this was never officially supported in any API that I know of, and indeed is one of those silly backend hacks that works in a few cases and falls flat in a lot of other legitimate ones. Great for DX5/6/7/8 games, but silly beyond that.
Indeed, but it doesn't prevent you from doing more in either of those cases. Even NVIDIA's CSAA modes are supported just fine through the DX interfaces.
As I mentioned above, those days are rightfully gone as it is unreasonable to develop software for a specific GPU. Conversely, rendering has gotten to the level of programmability and generality that drivers can no longer safely infer how rendering is being done, as most of stuff that generates an image now is application code, not fixed-function logic.
A huge part of that is *not screwing with what the game is trying to do behind its back*! Otherwise the next game patch or driver update could very well break things again.
I agree that DX5/6/7 were poor 3D APIs compared to OpenGL, but OpenGL has since become so incredibly outdated and irrelevant that there's simply no argument anymore. (Also note that I specifically stated talking about DX9/10+ rendering engines.) If OpenGL was updated to what is required/expected by modern rendering engines, it would have exactly the same "issues" as DX here: drivers can no longer expect to pull nearly as much crap behind the application's back because most of the rendering is now handled by user code. Thus typically you're restricted to performance optimizations, because - and let me stress - *there is no reasonable and robust way to impose things like AA on a modern rendering engine*, which may well be doing *anything* with the data in its buffers/render targets. The days of "I fire off a bunch of triangles and textures to the GPU and it does all the rendering and gives me back a framebuffer" are long gone, thank goodness.
Ironically, you're arguing against yourself here
Good luck trying to do any half-decent graphics (by today's standards) using only fixed-function.
Yes indeed. The point here is that if a modern game has lousy AA, by all means fault the game (I do)! All of the "tools" of the fixed-function days are still available for the application to use, so it's not like they can't get as good "quality" as DX7 apps (in fact, it's quite trivial). What *has* changed is now it's more of the application building a rendered frame using the given tools rather than basically the GPU building a rendered frame with a few sliders for the application to play with. It's thus no longer appropriate (or safe) for the GPU to try and impose a hammer on the application when it may not even be using nails... or wood... or even building something.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=36790
They did it for STALKER (DX9).
It's game developers, who use strange technologies like Deferred Rendering, and Microsoft/DirectX9, which don't allow to do MSAA on MRTs or to read back from Z-Buffer.
