For The Last Time SM2.0 vs SM3.0
- Thread starter Blacklash
- Start date
Hellbinder
Banned
The thing about this subject and others like it is that its completely pointless.
First it was ps 1.1 Vs 1.4 then 2.0 FP16/FX12/FP24/FP32... Now its SM3.0 Vs Sm2.0 Vs sm 2.0B..
Each generation or sub generation a mere 6-8 months appart changes all the arguments that people fought, argued, insisted on etc etc etc and makes them totally moot. None of this matters at all as far as i can see. Worst case sinario for anyone, wait till october and see the next round. When that round comes out the debate will just get taken to the next level, the next technology, the next implimentation etc etc etc...
The only thing that matters is can the card you can afford Play all the games you want to play with the options important to you at FPS you can live with.
Honestly, If i was buying a new card today I would get an Nv40 simply becuase overall its a better piece of hardware. If I had just gotten a 9700 or 9800 level card i would keep that until the next round and not get anything.
The real acid test of wether the X800's are going to cut it will be Doom-III, HL2 and Stalker. The faercry 1.3 patch is already dagger in the back number one, if Quality and performance is better on another one or two of those games mentioned above i think its a no brainer which architecture you should put your money into. IMO to determine the real impact of SM3 Vs SM2 For now dont take any action on a new card until a few more games with at least rudimentary SM3 support are released.
(and dont be so sure about that Valve "friends" with ATi thing. You may be supprised by the end results you see)
First it was ps 1.1 Vs 1.4 then 2.0 FP16/FX12/FP24/FP32... Now its SM3.0 Vs Sm2.0 Vs sm 2.0B..
Each generation or sub generation a mere 6-8 months appart changes all the arguments that people fought, argued, insisted on etc etc etc and makes them totally moot. None of this matters at all as far as i can see. Worst case sinario for anyone, wait till october and see the next round. When that round comes out the debate will just get taken to the next level, the next technology, the next implimentation etc etc etc...
The only thing that matters is can the card you can afford Play all the games you want to play with the options important to you at FPS you can live with.
Honestly, If i was buying a new card today I would get an Nv40 simply becuase overall its a better piece of hardware. If I had just gotten a 9700 or 9800 level card i would keep that until the next round and not get anything.
The real acid test of wether the X800's are going to cut it will be Doom-III, HL2 and Stalker. The faercry 1.3 patch is already dagger in the back number one, if Quality and performance is better on another one or two of those games mentioned above i think its a no brainer which architecture you should put your money into. IMO to determine the real impact of SM3 Vs SM2 For now dont take any action on a new card until a few more games with at least rudimentary SM3 support are released.
(and dont be so sure about that Valve "friends" with ATi thing. You may be supprised by the end results you see)
SDK doc is wrong in this regard. Someone asked the question on DirectX mailing list, nVIDIA employee explicitly stated what's been said by tb.poly-gone said:
http://discuss.microsoft.com/SCRIPTS/WA-MSD.EXE?A2=ind0405b&L=directxdev&D=1&P=3979
poly-gone said:
Its changed for the latest version, not sure if they have updated the docs yet.
IF the card supports VS3.0 you can use vertex instanceing on any/all code regardless of vertex shader version currently set (including fixed function). It makes sense when you think about it, geometry instancing has nothing to do with shaders as its programming the DMA subsystem.
Its a bug in the specification really that links the two together at all (we should really have a cap bit for vertex instancing seperate from vertex shader version). Same thing almost happened with VS2.0 and newer vertex types when Dx9 came out (if you read the Dx9 headers it still claims there linked), luckily it was caught and even ATI8500 can use some of the new vertex types.
Hellbinder said:
I look at this a different way. It seems to me that the NV hardware needed a SM3.0 patch just to be competitive with ATI's new offerings in a shader heavy game like Farcry.
Since SM2.0 is pretty well going to be the baseline programming model for a long time the X800 is looking pretty good if Farcry is any indication. Are the 6800's going to require a SM3.0 patch in new games (with a fair amount of shaders) to be competitive with the ATI cards? Like in TRON 2.0 for instance. If so, how many patches is NV going to fork $ out for?
It's also worth noting that NV3x hardware seems to end up going downhill from now on. TWIMTBP developers will be used to push NV4x with PS3, and thus the FX cards will get the treatment that Valve suggested - DX8.1 codepath by default, PS2.0 at your own risk 'cause we had no time left to optimize it...
Simon F said:
Too many bones, we currently have a blended animation system even with caching between soldiers we still get several hundred different bone matrices in an army. BTW By armies I'm talking hundreds (tending toward to thousands) of skinned characters.
To fully batch we would need a very large constant store, arbitary mem read from the shader or vertex texturing are the techniques we are looking at. The other techique would be some kind of multi-pass render-to-vertex buffer technique using the pixel shader hardware to do the skinning.
Hellbinder
Banned
Not once the 1.3 farcry patch is released with noticably increased IQ at playable FPS.Blastman said:
