Recent content by radar1200gs

I never mentioned anything about underlying hardware support, did I? It's good to keep the hardware evolving, even if the API doesn't keep pace, it allows developers to become familiar with the future API (so when the new API does launch people don't have to wait 18 months to see games appear...

No, I don't think so. The simple fact of the matter is DirectX 9 was released almost 2 years before it was truly required. DirectX 8 was still a young and powerful API that had barely been touched by games develeopers and was just starting to come into its own. It is only now being...

Thing is, nVidia was basically correct. DX9 was essentially irrelevant to games until NV40, R4xx and Half-Life 2 came along. Up until then DirectX 8 was what developers targetted, in no small part due to the fact that the original xbox was also DX8 and the huge install base of Dx8 generation...

We've already had the discussion on how much work is involved in supporting partial precision (a trained monkey could do it blindfolded). If you are going to bring up the issue of art assets as a defense, then you first need to explain why ATi's Doom3 shader replacement doesn't degrade image...

I think what we have seen since the launch of DX9 is that full precision (as in FP32 being the highest DX9 precision available) is rarely required in everyday usage and that partial precision will generally suffice (unless there is a need for intensive, iterative calculations). I would have a...

Yes, I can see where point sampling can help, but bilinear, trilinear and Anisotropic filtering seem to be worthless in the vertex shader to me.

Then your in-game tesselator is probably broken.

Perhaps I'm missing something fundamental here, but why would you want vertex data to be filtered the same way as pixel data in the first place? It doesn't make much sense - about the only use I can see is it would help ensure there are no accidental holes in a vertex mesh anywhere.

Last time I checked, it was Microsoft, not nVidia or ATi that sets the specs and provides the forwards direction (which the IHV's then have to impliment in silicon), so I fail to see where you think nVidia is dragging the market towards SM3.0. Having said that, ATi is late for the SM3.0 party...

Why do you keep going on about contracts? If nVidia had put the effort into nV35 they could probably have launched it about the same time you could buy nV30. The vendors would have nV35, which nVidia could simply label NV30 if they chose to...

Sorry, had to address this. You don't honestly believe that nVidia designed and built nV35 in between R300 launch and nV30 availability do you??? If you do, ask yourself, why didn't nVidia directly fix their biggest problem, register congestion? nV35 was in development for quite a long...

Democoder, what precision FP temps are you talking here? If thats 4 FP32 temps, then that translates to 8 FP16 temps.

The only bit I never got with the NV30 launch was why nVidia insisted on bringing nV30 to market after R300 and the failed tapeout around that time. They should have gone straight to nV35 right then and there and saved a lot of embarrasment.

nVidia and Microsoft were in a legally binding contract. MS wanted to break that contraxt, nVidia didn't. Unsuprisingly, the courts favored nVidia. This didn't go down well with MS.

WGF - Windows Graphics Foundation.