Doomtrooper said:
Who doesn't want HLSL graphics quicker, but one when one company is marketing one specifcally optimized for their cards only, how does that improve the graphics industry in a whole and why do we need three or (FOUR including Renderman) standards.
Gotta agree with you in general, I'm dissapointed about the lack of openness in Cg's aproach, from the current lack of feedback it seems pretty reasonable to assume other companies like ATi or Matrox won't go through the pain and develop their own optimizations for Cg, they'll probably either just sit it out until MS' HLSL or OGLHL come around or release sothing of their own. As long as its only Nvidia I don't see a whole lot of developers really using Cg to its fullest in development either, which would kind of defeat the purpose of introducing such a language now, and calling it a standard is a joke in itself ...
I guess it can still be used as a practice (following languages will probably be similar enough, especially DX9 HLSL) and a tool to generate shader code to tweak by hand, which is kinda usefull but far from being revolutionary.
As for the different standards, I think there are going to be even more than just four around. Don't forget Stanford's shading system which I would actually switch against renderman in your argument, as renderman is plainly not suited for realtime graphics and thus is not gonna compete against Cg, HLSL, OGLSL or whatever else gets thrown into the mix in the future, whereas Stanford's system probably will.
I still don't see why to make such a negative fuzz about it though, despite its lacks and letdowns I don't see Cg as being a bad thing, just less than it could have been. Some companies always have and will continue to push ahead with what they think is the right way to do something, not waiting fot the industry as a whole because the standardizing bodies often are far too slow and cumbersome, its a common way to advance the industry and happens all the time. Things apear, innovate a little in their time and dissapear, I'm pretty sure Cg will fall into that cathegory. How long has it been since hardware supports programmable vertex and pixel shaders and other things, that even today are only exposed in vendor specific extensions in OGL? When will OGL 1.4 and 1.5 finally be approved? For comparison just look at the internet, which could almost be considered a worst case scenario IMHO - HTML didn't evolve fast enough, so both Netscape and Microsoft started introducing new tags and tried improving over existing tags and features, but only their specific browsers supported these. That caused incompatibilities and additional work for the webmasters, but in the end resulted in better looking websites, sooner. Sure, all those features were on the list of things to be added in the next HTML revisions, but those were taking ever longer and longer to get aproved, so companies got sick of waiting - concerning the negative impact (incompatibilities etc.), things aren't nearly going to be as dramatic in the graphics market IMHO, at least Nvidia seems to be trying to stick with already existing standards (DX, OGL), even if not directly supporting their competitors (PS1.4 or ATi OGL extensions), but who seriously expected them to?
Future languages will pick what they like from Cg and the others following, after a couple years we might even end up with just one standard, who knows ...
