Perhaps they switch to SFR when rendering into Multisampled render targets. Since in such case it definitely becomes pixel heavy. AA definitely seems to pose problems for this.
If all GPUs allowed programmable sample positions they could do the AA themselves. OR maybe they could modify the...
Do you mean sort first or sort last? Object divison will give sort last since the FB has to be recombined and visibility resolved at each pixel.
The bandwidth requirement *is* too high but I think Extremetech's comment that they observed it performing better than SLI counts for something no...
I think it will be more efficient to do it in a simple compositing engine when the number of GPUs are more in which case multiple z values have to be compared for single pixel. On a quick scan the "compositing three-dimensional graphics images using associative decision mechanism" seems to be...
That's not really lossy compression, its just a z-test acceleration structure and it is fully* orthogonal to z-buffer compression—you can have one without the other. Lossy z-buffer compression would be unrecoverable loss in z-buffer data.
* I think some compression schemes might use the Hi-Z...
If they can't achieve lossless compression on a tile at any bit rate lower than full uncompressed z bit rate, they simply don't compress the tile. I think the compression rates they give are best/average case.
The compression schemes are optimized for coherent random accesses.
These papers summarize some of the compression methods used in GPUs for framebuffer (color and Z buffer) compression, based on information in the patents.
http://graphics.cs.lth.se/research/papers/2007/cbc/cbc2007.pdf...
How is the pay in these 3D chip companies compared to say Microsoft? Its generally said that game developers are under paid partly because there are many young developers interested in working.
Here in India, it appears the pay in ATI and nVidia is not very attractive for a skilled engineer...
These days I end up spending most time for technical related stuff!
Non-tech hobbies that have survived:
Reading (fiction and non-fiction),
Watching good movies and an occasional anime,
Sketching,
and hanging out at pubs once in a while or trying out various restaurants. (not sure if...
mhouston, perhaps you should get in touch with Eric Lengyel
The original thread: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=408512
Perhaps someone can invite him to join in this discussion, wouldn't mind more details :)
What he means is a tool/debugger that intercepts and overrides the application's modelview matrix among other things. A free cam mode here would let one explore the scene that is submitted by the application from any viewpoint (though for most applications you end up looking at the scene frustum...
Wow I am in a pretty similar situation. I've been working for a year right after my college and there is not enough good graphics stuff to do at my job. There have been a few good challenges but that's it. The company I am working for has a research division but I haven't seen anything great...
Okay I am not really sure what you need to store in your two depth textures. Are these depth textures to be used only with the translucent object or are they used for shadowing the scene too?
Here is what I did to get the thickness buffer ( I think it should work for getting the extents too)...