For The Last Time SM2.0 vs SM3.0

[Simon F]

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.

Fair enough. In that case, (proper) vertex texturing sounds like the sort of thing you'd want.

 

[Rolf N]

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)

Careful there. You're mixing up two related but different things.
1)What chip is better?
2)What can/can't these chips do?

#1 will incur flames and bloodshed, especially in its improved version "What card is teh best?", without any further information. This is IMO the stupidest thread topic imaginable. YMMV.

#2 can be a useful discussion, as long as everybody keeps it on-topic and technical. Someone participating in a #2 discussion may or may not get a subjective idea of "what chip is better" for them in the process. But that wasn't an explicit part of the question.

IMO it's always more effective to gather the facts and make up your own mind instead of asking for opinions directly. You can't tell how much an opinion is "worth" anyway, if you don't ask for what it's based on.

 

[Xmas]

HDR, 3Dc, etc.

Well hdr might certianly do so. But are we sure about 3dc

As long as they don't ship new textures with the patch, 3Dc will increase performance but slightly decrease IQ (since it is lossy compression). That is, if the original normal maps are uncompressed.

 

[pat777]

HDR, 3Dc, etc.

Well hdr might certianly do so. But are we sure about 3dc

As long as they don't ship new textures with the patch, 3Dc will increase performance but slightly decrease IQ (since it is lossy compression). That is, if the original normal maps are uncompressed.

3DC will increase IQ because with higher performance you can use higher resolution normal maps.

High Resolution 3DC Normal Maps >>> Low Resolution uncompressed normal maps.

 

[Cryect]

Not once the 1.3 farcry patch is released with noticably increased IQ at playable FPS

Where do u get increased iq from ?

How about the displacement mapping?

 

[KimB]

3DC will increase IQ because with higher performance you can use higher resolution normal maps.

High Resolution 3DC Normal Maps >>> Low Resolution uncompressed normal maps.

You can also use DXT5.

 

[Pete]

pat777, Sam knows the choice is basically default normal maps with higher performance or higher-res maps with non-3Dc performance (hence, "As long as they don't ship new textures with the patch....").

 

[Evildeus]

As long as they don't ship new textures with the patch, 3Dc will increase performance but slightly decrease IQ (since it is lossy compression). That is, if the original normal maps are uncompressed.

Well i'm comparing with compressed textures of course. They must be using DTX5 don't you think? But the other thread on 3Dc being a big improvement over DTX5 is still hanging so....

 

[Xmas]

Well i'm comparing with compressed textures of course. They must be using DTX5 don't you think?

Currently? I don't think so. But even if they were, 3Dc won't show any better quality than the format in which the normal maps are stored. The best quality can always be achieved with uncompressed textures, though performance may prove insufficient.

 

[Evildeus]

I agree with you.