Recent content by Dany Lepage

Dynamic branching performance From a performance standpoint: Assuming you have only 1 ALU do do your maths and you decide to branch, then you will have to wait until you know the outcome of conditional code before jumping. This is especially annoying on CPUs when the pipeline is very long...

In my opinion, PCI-E will have a major impact on how games are designed because you should be able to finally read from the graphic chip memory without breaking the streaming of the transactions between the core logic and the GPU. PCI-E is a point to point bus meaning that it works just like...

In my opinion, Shader Model 3.0 is a huge step forward compared with Shader Model 2.0. Shader Model 3.0 adds dynamic branching in the pixel shader and while it's not required, I'm expecting the major IHVs to provide a complete orthogonal solution (FP16 texture filtering/blending) in their next...

Shadow Buffer precision Even if I didn't try it. I'm almost 100% sure the ATI DX9 implementation would have been fine. In fact, during the porting of the xbox version, we were confronted with which algorithm we would use for a replacement to the depth texture extension used on NV hardware...

AA I stand by a comment I made a while ago in the www.splintercell.com forum. If DirectX would be supporting multisampled texture render targets, that would solve the problem right away without any need for us to do anything. Obviously, that won't happen with DX8. However, I heard Nvidia is...

How "Shadow projector" works. First of all, lets look at a classic scene of SC-PC. Either in the retail game or the demo #2(a/b), open the console (F2) and type "open 1_1_2tbilisi". If you are running on a GF3/4Ti/FX card, be sure to uncomment the line ForceShadowMode=0 in splintercell.ini...

AA support could be fixed in DX9a (assuming the copy function from a multisample render target to a texture is fast enough) but SC (1) won't be "supporting" DX9A. You need to have access to Direct3D9 objects but the code is written with "Direct3DDevice8" calls and changing all the calls to use...

Hi Andy, I'll give you that one. For my position to be fully consistent, I should forget about vendor specific extensions and as you said, Nvidia got the shadow map algorithm as a bonus because they were in xbox, this is something by itself but doesn't have anything to do with the core...

If you want to do post filtering effects like night vision. You need to render your scene to a texture and then do a few passes of post processing on it. You eventually end up copying this texture into the mainbuffer. Unfortunatly, in DX8, it's impossible to create multisamples texture render...

Most people have used SC-Bench by putting all settings to high/very high and then scale the resolution. This is not the best way to benchmark SC because by scaling the resolution, you only scale the on-screen rendering part of the whole rendering process. Off-screen rendering is just as...

Splinter Cell - Fairness of using Projector mode for benchs Splinter Cell, running in projector mode, runs the same code on NV2x/3x and R2xx/3xx chips. This mean they are all using the same PS 1.1 code. It certainly not fair to compare ATI's cards running in projector mode against NV cards...

Shadow Projector implementation Extract from the readme 1.2 patch file I wrote a while ago. On all other current hardware, the game is using another technique called projected shadows (shadow projectors). The technique is somewhat similar, we render the scene from the light point of view...

Splinter Cell - Shadows Hi all, The Shadow Buffer version of Splinter Cell is using the D3DFMT_D24 format (Render to Texture). However, the implementation has several tradeoffs that don't really make sense on PC. 1) Even when nothing is moving in the shadow cone (static light, static...