First game to use MEMEXPORT ?

[nelg]

I would assume the initial games for the XBOX 360 did not utilize this feature as the the final dev kits arrived only shortly before launch. So where and how are we going to see this utilized first?

 

[dukmahsik]

prob 2nd gen games or even 3rd gen games i.e. halo 3

 

[Hardknock]

I think Memexport is mostly for long complex shaders. I'm guessing for stuff like parellax occulusion mapping? But i'm not sure... Also if anyone knows, does the memexport help with branch intensive shaders??

 

[mckmas8808]

prob 2nd gen games or even 3rd gen games i.e. halo 3

Why should it take so long?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think Memexport is mostly for long complex shaders. I'm guessing for stuff like parellax occulusion mapping? But i'm not sure... Also if anyone knows, does the memexport help with branch intensive shaders??

MEMEXPORT allows a value held in the graphics card registers to be passed elsewhere to the system from midway through a shader. That contrasts with needing a shader to run to completion and only being able to use it's output data. So if you're doing some vertex transformation say, half-way through the shader you could export partially tranformed data tot he CPU to use in some other process.

I'm not really sure what it'll be used for, but it doesn't help with branched shaders.

 

[tema]

We've been told about Xenos exotic features but does anyone have any idea what these features bring to our screens?

 

[Guden Oden]

I think Memexport is mostly for long complex shaders.

It's used for adaptive (level-of-detail-based) tesselation too IIRC. So games that tesselate according to the terrain/objects' distance to the camera should use memexport...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

1. You can do that without Memexport, it's been done on both current gen consoles and PCs as well.

2. You can use Memexport for many things, it's not a 'simple' feature like AF or transparency...

 

[Guden Oden]

The hardware tesselation unit in xenos is said to require a 2-pass method of processing using memexport when doing adaptive tesselation. No current GPU has a hardware tesselator capable of doing realtime adaptive tesselation (and most GPUs don't have tesselation hardware at all).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Who said that it was hardware accelerated? Of course it was done on the CPU (or one of the VUs in PS2).
What's more, depending on bus traffic and resource availability, even X360 developers may decide to process such stuff on the CPU instead.

 

[weaksauce]

prob 2nd gen games or even 3rd gen games i.e. halo 3

How do you count the generation of games?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

2. You can use Memexport for many things, it's not a 'simple' feature like AF or transparency...

Can you give some examples? The only listed example I've read is Dave's talk of GPGPU functionality like physics acceleration. As I understand it, MEMEXPORT augments the CPU by providing access to a very fast SIMD vector processing array. Given the strong capabilities of the CPU though, and the fact using Xenos's MEMEXPORT to help out in this area would be taking away from the resources for graphics rendering, I can't see that that would be preferential. Where MEMEXPORT should be ideal is if during Xenos normal graphics rendering, useful data can be passed back to the CPU for other processes, allowing more work to be obtained from the same calculations. It'd be nice to have some examples of what actual benefits this would have.

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

How do you count the generation of games?

Thats a good question, most peope use the years, its first gen games are the games that came out in its first year, its second gen games are out in the second year of its life...etc...etc..

But i think of it per studio, say if a developer creates a game for PS2 6 years into its life cycle and its there first ever go at developing for the system. Most people would call it a 6th generation title but i would put it as a 1st gen game as the studio has only worked on PS2 once.

Thats how i do it anyway.

 

[PG2G]

But 6 years in wouldn't really be 1st gen because they aren't working with 1st generation tools, knowledge, or documentation. IMO of course.

 

[Nicked]

How do you count the generation of games?

Apart from doing it by years, I would say by the release of key titles on a system.Titles which engines are a class above the rest and are generally popular games. Generational changes are often indistinct and meld into each other though:

For X360 I envisage it will go something like:

Launch > Gears of War > Halo3 > something > Halo 4.

--- Probably +-1 year between each.


For PS2 it was, to me:
Launch > GT3 > GTA3 > Dark Chronicles > MGS3 > RE4 > KH2 > ?

--- Time varies from 6 months to 2 years.