Recent content by 790

Of course China's a permanent member. It's the second largest economy in the world, and has the largest military. You can't have a united nations without them, even if you don't like them personally. You seem to be confused. The USA is just as responsible for the 12 years as any other nation...

Andersson, the UN doesn't work like that. Iraq, or rogue dictators, do not sit on the security council, nor are they protected by any sacred scripture. Five permanent members, and 10 rotational members do. These members are chosen by the power of the respective countries, which is the only...

I support the war, but the deeper issue this war has exposed is how easily international democracy can crumble and the US can go off and do what it wants. America has made awful decisions in the past, such as Vietnam, and we all hope something like that will never happen again. But the fact...

There's a Microsoft DX9 shader specification document out there somwhere. It was leaked from Betaplace last year. It's not on Betaplace any longer, so you'd have to scout this forum or google.

Nothing is horribly wrong, but NVIDIA will play this out until the eleventh hour in the hopes of keeping fringe customers away from the ever-tempting ATI lineup.

Compared to what? It's the world's most popular game, with good reason. If you're a yank, remember, outside of the US nobody plays any of your games (AF,BB,BB) ;-0 Saying that, I'm not a soccer fan, and I would never touch a sports computer game. Except for extreme sports (wrestling is only...

2X AA is a huge difference. Simply upping the resolution does not negate the need for AA, and never will. That screenshot is a poor example of AA benefits, because 1. High compression 2. Low edge detail (contrast with say, BF1942, where it's actually disconcerting without AA) 3. It's static...

This is completely false. They do, and I know firsthand. I also know firsthand that we've never had any problems with 1.1 shaders on ATI hardware that wasn't our fault. I honestly can't seem to see much of a point in your recent posts, except to knock ATI?

Let me clarify, I was talking about your middle-level table lookup operations when I said intermediate, not general HLSL->hardware assembly. I do agree that hardware-aware optimizations may be important, but I have full faith that if Microsoft, ATI, and NVIDIA are happy with the current setup...

HLSL does both. There are no visible registers, and normalize() is available for any hardware that supports it. Furthermore, the effects files allow you to completely forget about any low-level stuff such as binding texture levels, writing a single line of code, or even loading textures! Try...

Christ man, nobody worries about this already. Just write the shader, and let it run. The driver has sufficient information to do low-level optimizations, intermediate-level optimizations are NOT WORTH THE TROUBLE. STOP WORRYING ABOUT IT. Because ps1.x hardware is so primitive, it's rather...

That's all I'm talking about. Of course, some developers are going to go overboard for cinematic effect, but in real life your eyes take a while to adjust to all conditions. If you go into a dark room it can take up to 20 minutes for your pupils to dialate fully. This is closely linked to...

Unfortunately, you will experience quantum phase decoherence in such a system even at 0K, due to entanglement, see Caldeira-Leggett and Mohtany et al. On topic, the PC market is a tricky one. It's no surprise that the best selling PC games run on the absolute lowest denominator systems (RTS...

If it's hardware that can't do normalize in assembly, and I am using the samplers, it'll then have to fail. Therefore, you still must know what is going on behind the scenes to know why it failed (Err: On ps1.x hardware, normalize function uses one sampler and one cube map, please free up a...

Fair enough, but you have to admit that it brings on considerable burden to the environment and portability to have such a complex and high-level runtime compiler, not to mention increasing the learning curve and scope for the developer (they must be aware of what can on behind the scenes, or...