cg Lives! Nvidia shader lang for PS3 :)

[Xmas]

Which shading language is the most portable?
HLSL: PC (DX9, WGF2.0), Xbox2
Cg: PC (DX9, OpenGL; future in conjunction with WGF2.0 and OpenGL 2.x unclear), PS3
GLSL: PC (OpenGL 2.0)

Does shader portability matter?
Hardly. The amount of shader code is minimal compared to the amount of application code that needs to be changed for porting to another platform. Shading languages are very similar, especially HLSL and Cg. Artists will work with visual tools that auto-generate shaders from code blocks.

Does Sony care about portability?
No.

It's highly expected that the Cell's SPE would deal with the TnL and other Vertex operations.

I don't expect the PS3 GPU to be anything but a complete GPU, including VS.

 

[ANova]

Anyone know what UE3 uses? All I could find was this.

Unreal Engine 3 is provided as one unified codebase that compiles on PC and all supported next-generation console platforms. All game content and data files are compatible across all supported platforms, for fast turnaround time between code and content development on PC, and playtesting on console or PC.

I'm assuming whatever it uses must be widely accepted by all platforms.

 

[bloodbob]

I assume U3 uses its own language and compiles to PS/VS code. Either that or they use precompiled segment and combines them in real time. ( not quite as simply as catting the segments together I bet )

Portable != popular. ( Or else something designed to only run on windows is popular ). Hand twinked output from the Cg compiler isn't portable I don't care what you lot say.

 

[KimB]

Hand twinked output from the Cg compiler isn't portable I don't care what you lot say.

Well, duh. But as long as you keep the high-level shader that's not a problem.