Deano Calver
Newcomer
Dave is the journo so I let him to the real reporting but there were a few things that caught my eye/ear. As a non-NDA event the presentations were public infomation (of course, any gossipping over a pint isn't for public consumption 
).
ATI gave some infomation on video cards market pentration data, and had a quick gloat about being in both Microsoft's and Nintendo's next gen console, no real info on them (obviously) except for one tiny snippet, that we should expect at least Dx9 level shaders on both. Wether or not its the same basic core being used in both they didn't say.
Microsoft showed off early version of there new graphics tools. GPA (Graphics Performance Ananlyser) is a tool that can sample whats going on in D3D. Its meant for performance monitoring while developing, but it may also be a handy way of looking inside other D3D applications. Also a D3D Helper library should make developing easier, by shadowing the entire D3D state, when debugging you can effectively 'see through' the COM interface to what D3D is actually doing. Its also includes stats and simple routines to dump states to screen, warning and erronous states are checked and generally alot of things to make D3D nicer to develop with. Also they are about to release the SDK update, a non-runtime update that includes lots of new documentation, D3DX functions and exporters. 3D Studio MAX 6 has been upgraded to integrate into D3D effects closely, combined with a new exporter it should improve artist work flow.
ATI did more presentations on image-space post-processing. Re-covering some of the same ground they've done before, it did have some extensions of Masaki Kawase light steaiking filters and I hadn't seen the heat haze filters before. Microsoft gave a quick overview to Precomputed Radiance Transfer and Spherical Harmonics, while the technology is amazing convincing people to use it in real games seems to be the real problem. Lots of people were very negative on any actual non-demo use, personally I can see it being very useful but initially just the spherical harmonic irradience not the full on precomputed radiance transfer (though PRT for subsurface scattering objects would seem to make a lot of sense...). Intel did some talks on SSE, PNI (Prescott New Instructions) and Hyper threading, Intel were pushing HT as the way forward. A possible 20% extra performance on HT P3 today, 30% when Prescott is released, next one after that 40% and the long term aim is for 2x/4x performance.
The most interesting talk in Beyond3D terms was Mike's very general talk about the next Direct3D. I'll let Dave do it properly but in general it was primitive programmability and single resource model (texture and vertex data interchangable etc).
).ATI gave some infomation on video cards market pentration data, and had a quick gloat about being in both Microsoft's and Nintendo's next gen console, no real info on them (obviously) except for one tiny snippet, that we should expect at least Dx9 level shaders on both. Wether or not its the same basic core being used in both they didn't say.
Microsoft showed off early version of there new graphics tools. GPA (Graphics Performance Ananlyser) is a tool that can sample whats going on in D3D. Its meant for performance monitoring while developing, but it may also be a handy way of looking inside other D3D applications. Also a D3D Helper library should make developing easier, by shadowing the entire D3D state, when debugging you can effectively 'see through' the COM interface to what D3D is actually doing. Its also includes stats and simple routines to dump states to screen, warning and erronous states are checked and generally alot of things to make D3D nicer to develop with. Also they are about to release the SDK update, a non-runtime update that includes lots of new documentation, D3DX functions and exporters. 3D Studio MAX 6 has been upgraded to integrate into D3D effects closely, combined with a new exporter it should improve artist work flow.
ATI did more presentations on image-space post-processing. Re-covering some of the same ground they've done before, it did have some extensions of Masaki Kawase light steaiking filters and I hadn't seen the heat haze filters before. Microsoft gave a quick overview to Precomputed Radiance Transfer and Spherical Harmonics, while the technology is amazing convincing people to use it in real games seems to be the real problem. Lots of people were very negative on any actual non-demo use, personally I can see it being very useful but initially just the spherical harmonic irradience not the full on precomputed radiance transfer (though PRT for subsurface scattering objects would seem to make a lot of sense...). Intel did some talks on SSE, PNI (Prescott New Instructions) and Hyper threading, Intel were pushing HT as the way forward. A possible 20% extra performance on HT P3 today, 30% when Prescott is released, next one after that 40% and the long term aim is for 2x/4x performance.
The most interesting talk in Beyond3D terms was Mike's very general talk about the next Direct3D. I'll let Dave do it properly but in general it was primitive programmability and single resource model (texture and vertex data interchangable etc).
