Articles to write ? (Feedback)

[Reverend]

Why, Kristof should have asked me b4 he posted this. :smile:

There is only one article I'd like to see, and if I have the time and no other website writes such an article in a scope that is at any length or depth that I'm personally satisfied with, I will write it myself (but it'll be difficult to realize, since I have to depend on other individuals). and that is :

1) Exactly how the 2 predominant APIs, DX and OGL, evolve with the various IHVs around
2) Exactly if and how developer feedback influence a chip's design
3) Exactly how a developer "designs" his game around a certain level of hardware capabilities, taking into account the all important "majority market" conundrum

These are just 3 that came OTOH. I personally do not believe in this site spending a lot of time explaining how things such as PS or VS works, otr how such a thing as aniso filtering works, or how FSAA may evolve (as these can be found elsewhere already, and as for FSAA, there are so many ways this can be done that "limiting" an article to discussing the possiblities may appear, er, close-minded or unknowledgeable).

I suppose, what I'd really like to see, hopefully on our site, is one article explaining in detail the intricacies of the evolvement of DX/OGL vis-a-vis IHV interaction... that is after all how the current hard-core crowd judge a piece of hardware, regardless of knowledge of the undeniable way the gaming industry works when it comes to using announced technology.

 

[Livecoma]

I'm really curious to learn more about how ATI, NVIDIA, PowerVR, Matrox, etc. manage their driver development.

For instance, as far as I can see they recieve input from two major sources. customers and developers. You have customers wanting better performance, control panels, bugs fixed with current games, and frequent updates etc. Then you have developers working on unreleased games spoting really specific bugs, and needing them fixed so they can make their games better. Also you gotta consider the chipmakers vision for their drivers, and resource concerns. QA in making sure fixing customer complaints dosn't unleash a new bug that a developer is going to complain about etc...


Pretty much I would like a little more insight into how a chipmaker melds all these concerns into a solid driver hehe. I think it may shed alot of light on peoples questions and concerns about drivers.

I don't know if that would be beyond the scope of the site though...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Livecoma on 2002-02-11 05:00 ]</font>

 

[sriracha]

There's lots of other stuff I'm curious about:
- You always hear about Nvidia executing on their roadmap. Now that we have a few releases out under the roadmap, how good has Nvidia been at actually hitting it? What's been held back? How much has it evolved as they've learned more or had to beat competitors?
- With the programmability of the NV30 being hinted at now, a clear analysis of what aspects would be programmable and very different from recent releases and what would not be. E.g., obviously the memory subsys is not programmable, but shaders would be. What are their choices? Where are there possible 'abstractions' that we hear hinted at by Carmack and others, but not deeply discussed or explained? It would be interesting to hear developers' perspective in a coherent form, as opposed to just some Q&amp;A's.
- Along those lines, what are developers the most frustrated with about programming graphics engines under DX8, OGL, Nvidia or ATI's choices. Maybe related to above question.
- What's really keeping shading/bumpmaps out of games? Is it just the time lags in including new hardware features in a 2 year game dev cycle or is it too time consuming, are ther skill set probs or some other barrier to implement? With a new shader engine make a difference?

Overall, I'm more interested in the "take a step back and tell us the big things that we don't know because we're not in the industry" kind of questions than the "RGSS vs. Supersampling" minutae.

As for pdf, I personally prefer html.

 

[Kristof]

About Driver development and hardware development procedures... its pretty unlikely that any company will hand out details, they might give you some hyped up PR statement but I doubt you'll get any real in-depth answers on it.

 

[Nick[FM]]

I would like to read something on lighting and shadows too. I mean, 8 lights (HW) with realistic reflections and shadows is something you still don't find anywhere in games.

Also DirectX vs OpenGL (thorough) in raw performance, could be fun to read. I mean, why certain things might be faster in DX and some in OpenGL. Also why some manufacturers drivers are performing better in OpenGL but worse in DX (&amp; vice versa), and how they optimize stuff for certain engines etc. How they do it, etc. You get the point!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: worm[MadOnion.com] on 2002-02-11 11:59 ]</font>

 

[Nite_Hawk]

Hi Kristof,

The FSAA article could be pretty cool, though I feel like the last FSAA article here at b3d already gave me a pretty good understanding of how it generally works. (is that/can it be posted?)

I think another article that could be interesting is a comparison of the opengl extensions written by nvidia/ati, and the differences in directx revisions for each card. What and how do ati and nvidia expose features through through opengl/directx for their cards? Do nvidia and ati implement them similarly? How do developers and competitors react to each implementation, and how will the current implementations be affected by the release of DX9/opengl 2.0?

Nite_Hawk