I just noticed this stanford paper about running complex shaders on programmable graphics hardware that cannot be rendered in a single pass.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rds/
Interesting.
Anyway they mention how many passes that R9700 and NV30 (and R8500) needs to complish different fragment shader tasks that requires multi-pass. We already know that NV30 can do more complex fragment shaders, so I will just make a note of it (see slides):
Procedural wood surface:
50 passes on R8500
7 passes on R9700
1 pass on NV30
Procedural flame shader:
20 passes on R8500
3 passes on R9700
1 pass on NV30
RenderMan bowling pin + projected textured lights:
7 passes on R8500
5 passes on R9700
5 passes on NV30
Edit: Ooops important: I forgot to mention that the hardware is limited by instructions in the first two cases, while they are limited by interpolants in the last.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rds/
Interesting.
Anyway they mention how many passes that R9700 and NV30 (and R8500) needs to complish different fragment shader tasks that requires multi-pass. We already know that NV30 can do more complex fragment shaders, so I will just make a note of it (see slides):
Procedural wood surface:
50 passes on R8500
7 passes on R9700
1 pass on NV30
Procedural flame shader:
20 passes on R8500
3 passes on R9700
1 pass on NV30
RenderMan bowling pin + projected textured lights:
7 passes on R8500
5 passes on R9700
5 passes on NV30
Edit: Ooops important: I forgot to mention that the hardware is limited by instructions in the first two cases, while they are limited by interpolants in the last.
