DX7 GFX CAN MATCH DX9 GFX LEVEL GRAPHICS!!

[KimB]

Seconded.

No offense NeoCool but you seem thicker than I am. I'm quite thick you know, just ask the guys around here.

Now for a comment on the strangeness of colloquial US English. How does, "No offense, but you're an idiot." become somehow less offensive than, "You're an idiot." ?

 

[Althornin]

Seconded.

No offense NeoCool but you seem thicker than I am. I'm quite thick you know, just ask the guys around here.

Now for a comment on the strangeness of colloquial US English. How does, "No offense, but you're an idiot." become somehow less offensive than, "You're an idiot." ?

Its quite simple.
It has to do with the total inferiority of ATI to nVidia.



Neocool - If you are fillrate limited - a faster CPU CANNOT help framerates, ergo, your test is invalid....

 

[chapback]

Wata Wata!

http://htfriends.net/movies/minnanogolf4-water.mpg

thanks to the great maskraider!

 

[Unit01]

Neeyik and mufu

 

[JohnH]

And older dx7 hardware can also achieve just as good stencil shadow volumes, shadowmapping, per-pixel lighting, specular lighting, and bump mapping as newer cards can, just not at a reasonable speed. Oh, and that T & L water demo uses the GPU quite heavily or it wouldn't be able to run @ 30fps like it does on T & L hardware.

As a matter of interrest, the app in question wasn't that reliant on T&L, it ran faster on a Kyro than a GF2GTS (irc, I think the Kyro actually manged to beat a GF3 as well). This was down to an odd approach to render to texture (it did a render then blt'd to a texture) which meant that on most cards the frame rate had nothing to do with the presence of HW T&L, but instead was related to the completness of blt support within the driver.

John.

 

[Sxotty]

Yet none approach the Realism of Humus's Excellent Demo.

Yeah I'll agree with that, his looked sweet, but the question of how good others look is very subjective.

And to be honest no water that I have seen looks realistic.

Humus have you done a demo of flowing water? Like in a creek bed, I think for some reason that seems hard...What I wish is that someone could make an overly simplistic model of fluid dynamics, so that when you step into water instead of a little ring (as when you drop a pebble) it actually makes a wake and so forth...(I realize the calculations could be insane, that is why I said overly simple) perhaps then the "weather" of the game could be reflected in water movements as well, calm to wavey and so forth.

 

[Doomtrooper]

The best running water Demo to date IMO...

http://download.ati.com/misc/demos/ATI-8500-Nature-Demo-v1.1.exe

 

[Tim Murray]

I think you guys scared him off. Why are you so mean to the silly new people? I mean, don't you want this place to be known for its collection of ATI and NVIDIA fanboys who use 1337 in addition to the edifying technical commentary?

 

[Rasmoo]

Yet none approach the Realism of Humus's Excellent Demo.

Yeah I'll agree with that, his looked sweet, but the question of how good others look is very subjective.

And to be honest no water that I have seen looks realistic.

The swrendering link was a nice one though. Even though it only seems to address open water and wake effects (ok, I didn't go look at the pdf ).

Thought it was worth the download to have a peep at the avi's.

 

[Mintmaster]

Doomtrooper, as cool as that water looked in ATI's Nature demo, it wasn't simulated. They just had sinusoids running through the water. You could have a character stomping through Humus' water and ripples would be generated at his feet. You could have a boat racing through it and there would be a wake generated. It's the interactivity that makes it so cool (Humus, you should add a mouse controlled object in the water). That's why I'm eagerly waiting VS 3.0 so that pixel shader output can interact with geometry.

NeoCool, if you're still here, I was talking about the method in general, not this particular app, which has performance restrictions as JohnH pointed out. Something the size of a lake would require lots of vertices if done that way, and thus lots of CPU simulation time.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Thanks for the clarification Mintmaster...just wanted to show Sxotty a pretty nice water effect in a creek like he was asking...and only requiring PS 1.4.

I am playing the Dungeon Siege Expansion right now, that game doesn't allow you to enter the running creeks, just the lakes etc...be a nice effect for those style of games.

 

[Arun]

Actually I disagree with you guys
One of the coolest water demos I've ever seen is one of the for-developer Cg demos NVIDIA did when they released the NV30 emulator in the Det40s.

What's so good about it? No, it's not the pixel shading; it's the fact it's actually good-looking waves being done right in the Vertex Shader ( no CPU cheating AFAIK ).

Reminds me I should redownload it too, hehe


Uttar

EDIT: When it comes to pixel shading though, I do agree Humus' demos are the best, and by far!

 

[NeoCool]

Welp, there ain't no way a kryo can be faster than a geforce fx 5200-5950 series graphics card or radeon 9500-9800 series graphics card in the T & L demo!

 

[Humus]

Humus have you done a demo of flowing water? Like in a creek bed, I think for some reason that seems hard...What I wish is that someone could make an overly simplistic model of fluid dynamics, so that when you step into water instead of a little ring (as when you drop a pebble) it actually makes a wake and so forth...(I realize the calculations could be insane, that is why I said overly simple) perhaps then the "weather" of the game could be reflected in water movements as well, calm to wavey and so forth.

Nope, haven't tried that. I added it to my little list of demo ideas, but I can't promise I'll actually make a demo like that, sounds quite hard, but I'll think of it and see if I can come up with something.

 

[rubank]

I don´t understand this obsession with water. It almost always looks like toxic waste of some sort. But the big problem is it´s transition to other materials, like ground soil or rocks; Codecreatures benchmark demo does this really nicely but other than that it usually looks like utter crap. 3Dm03 nature test is one example of the latter.
Until these problems are handled in a good way, water physics is of less interest as I see it.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Games are about eye candy, and I will take all of the eye candy a developer can dish out to make the worlds in the game more real.

I think you can nitpick about any rendering, including skyboxes etc...the point is water does make games look better

 

[Humus]

Humus, you should add a mouse controlled object in the water

Done

 

[Ailuros]

Welp, there ain't no way a kryo can be faster than a geforce fx 5200-5950 series graphics card or radeon 9500-9800 series graphics card in the T & L demo!

I don't think John even mentioned those accelerators. Since you missed completely what he said about render 2 texture, there's not much use in further debating it, is there?

 

[Johnny_Physics]

I don´t understand this obsession with water. It almost always looks like toxic waste of some sort. But the big problem is it´s transition to other materials, like ground soil or rocks; Codecreatures benchmark demo does this really nicely but other than that it usually looks like utter crap. 3Dm03 nature test is one example of the latter.
Until these problems are handled in a good way, water physics is of less interest as I see it.

I know a couple of guys that tried to make a nice 3d-engine back in the days when the Pentium was fairly new and awesome. The landscape was composed of polygons while the surface of the water was made up of voxels(for fluid waves), and it apperently looked really nice.
But they couldn't get rid of one particular bug. This bug somehow continued to calculate the wave-effect when a wave hit the shore and the result of this was that the shore became some kind of horrible mutant beach with a life of its own whenever a wave got close enough.

 

[Tagrineth]

Humus have you done a demo of flowing water? Like in a creek bed, I think for some reason that seems hard...What I wish is that someone could make an overly simplistic model of fluid dynamics, so that when you step into water instead of a little ring (as when you drop a pebble) it actually makes a wake and so forth...(I realize the calculations could be insane, that is why I said overly simple) perhaps then the "weather" of the game could be reflected in water movements as well, calm to wavey and so forth.

IIRC this is why there is no water in Unreal Tournament 2003, despite it being promised early on. =) Performance was awful even on very high-end systems.