Current shader model 3 games generally need Ati Patch?

[Mendel]

I've seen now two patches to different games with some kinds of shader model 3 support which have needed to fix something to get the game render correctly on new Ati hardware...

Why? Shouldn't there be standards enough to avoid this? If you have to do things differently on each card, you might almost as well have native APIs for them

 

[bloodbob]

Exactly what standard creates bug free code?

 

[Jawed]

FarCry patches 1.31 and 1.32 both have a note about compatability with ATI SM3.

What's the other game?

Jawed

 

[Demirug]

Erath 2160

 

[Dave Baumann]

The question to ask the devs is whether is it actually SM3.0 or things that have been related to SM3.0.

 

[Reverend]

Shouldn't there be standards enough to avoid this?

Of course there are standards. But IHV DevRels sometimes conveniently forget them and tells devs to forget them too. Devs don't get fined for ignoring standards, you know.

 

[bloodbob]

Or they detect say SM3.0 and assume functionality since the NV cards were the only ones out at the time and now we are expecting ATI cards to come out soon.

 

[Dave Baumann]

For instance, how many of these patched SM3.0 have an HDR path? If they do, does the app not allow MSAA when the path is enabled?

 

[trinibwoy]

For instance, how many of these patched SM3.0 have an HDR path? If they do, does the app not allow MSAA when the path is enabled?

Dave, what's with all the tidbits all of a sudden. You wouldn't be dropping all these R520 hints just to pour water on the G70 release would you....Naaaaah

So ATi is gonna give us FP10 HDR + AA ?

 

[tEd]

For instance, how many of these patched SM3.0 have an HDR path? If they do, does the app not allow MSAA when the path is enabled?

Dave, what's with all the tidbits all of a sudden. You wouldn't be dropping all these R520 hints just to pour water on the G70 release would you....Naaaaah

So ATi is gonna give us FP10 HDR + AA ?

fp16 HDR + AA

 

[trinibwoy]

fp16 HDR + AA

Wouldn't that require significantly faster memory tech than we have today? That would be (is?) a killer feature though.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Dave, what's with all the tidbits all of a sudden. You wouldn't be dropping all these R520 hints just to pour water on the G70 release would you....Naaaaah

Yes, absolutely, of course it is. That’s exactly why I spend days of my personal time and effort into writing articles about it.

 

[tEd]

fp16 HDR + AA

Wouldn't that require significantly faster memory tech than we have today? That would be (is?) a killer feature though.

Obviously you need more memory bandwidth if you have 64bit per pixel instead of 32bit. Plus the MSAA even though you can save some with color compression but yeah more bandwith is of course needed.

 

[WaltC]

The question to ask the devs is whether is it actually SM3.0 or things that have been related to SM3.0.

Yes, as my interpretation of these statements has been: "These patches are necessary to accomodate our code to display the same way on both nV's SM3.0 hardware and ATi's SM2.0+ hardware." AFAIK, there's nothing you can display on SM3.0 that you cannot display on SM2.0b, but each SM has to be programmed for by the devs in order to provide the intended visual results. I could, of course, be wrong, but I don't think it should be forgotten that SM3.0 brings nothing new graphically to SM2.0b. The difference is in the programming, which it seems to me these patches are addressing.

 

[ZoinKs!]

I don't think SM2.0b has anything to do with it. If it did, why would the patch notes mention SM3.0 on *new* ati hardware? The only new hardware from ati in the near future will be r520 and crossfire.

Follow Dave's hints about "things that have been related to SM3.0" and hdr and take it towards the logical conclusions. Intriguing, wouldn't you say?

Of course, he could just be teasing. Not that he's been known to do that or anything

 

[Reverend]

For instance, how many of these patched SM3.0 have an HDR path? If they do, does the app not allow MSAA when the path is enabled?

Dave, what's with all the tidbits all of a sudden. You wouldn't be dropping all these R520 hints just to pour water on the G70 release would you....Naaaaah

"All of a sudden" ?

 

[Demirug]

For instance, how many of these patched SM3.0 have an HDR path?

In the case of Earth 2160 the patch have nothing to do with HDR.

If they do, does the app not allow MSAA when the path is enabled?

How can we know this as nobody have hardware that support MSAA with FP16 targets? Or even if somebody have such hardware can he (or she) talk about it?

The question to ask the devs is whether is it actually SM3.0 or things that have been related to SM3.0.

Yes. Maybe we should start to compare the caps that are needed for SM3 with the caps that NV40 and above supports.

 

[Dave Baumann]

How can we know this as nobody have hardware that support MSAA with FP16 targets? Or even if somebody have such hardware can he (or she) talk about it?

That was a rhetorical question, but one to illustrate that there are groups of feature capabilities that can be associated with one architecture that may not necessarily be the case with others.

 

[Jawed]

Well I expect Crytek has at least one R520 - it's been about 9 or 10 months now that ATI and Crytek have been pally.

Which reminds me, why was the water shader not working in The Project on NV SM3 hardware? Does it work correctly on 7800GTX

Jawed

 

[PatrickL]

I was curious about that.
The producer of Vanguard showed some ss of the alpha built of his next mmorpg. SS definitions were 1920 1200 and he said he made them on his pc with next gen ATI card. That is why I asked in an other thread how long before a launch developpers were getting next gen hardware.