Half Life 2 DirectX Class Feature usage

[Hyp-X]

theory 9)
Valve want to sell HL2 to Activision, but their contract doesn't allow them to,
so they delay the game until it hurts Vivendi and they couldn't refuse an offer.
Of course the only way to delay without being sued is to blame it on a vis major event...

 

[psurge]

Well, perhaps they mean that they use a radiosity style approach to compute a coarse 3d grid of ambient light intensities and primary directions which are used as input to the diffuse bump mapping pass?

 

[bloodbob]

psurge I'd like to believe that but it would take a lot of rendering power still I'd suggest.

Theory 10) the thing that wasn't leaked because I'm not allowed to talk about it was actually all they had done back in september and they are just no where near finished yet and the review is only going to be a few levels which they have managed to finish building.



AHAHAHA I found out how Valve are using centroid through ps2.0 they are patching the actual binary code produced for the shader to enable the flag or some other flag that the ati drivers recognise.

 

[KimB]

It will be interesting if FX5200 is defualtly placed in the DX9 category.

It will be interesting to find out.

For one, it really seems like the detail settings are far broader than just shader selection. As such, I really do hope that Valve allows us to tweak the settings with much more detail than just some sort of auto-detection of the video card used. That is, if I had a GeForce4 4600, I'd want to have quite a few more details turned on than if I had a GeForce3 Ti 200. I wouldn't just want to run it at a higher resolution.

 

[Andrew Meggs]

Just be my stupidity for the moment exactly wtf do the mean by radiosity based diffuse bump mapping. Are the shaders doing diffuse inter-reflections between the bumps in the bump maps or what? I don't really have a clue what they means by this.

For each world surface, multiple traditional Quake-style radiosity lightmaps are computed with the surface normal rotated in alternate directions. The pixel shader then interpolates between them based on the per-pixel normal taken from the normal map. Pretty neat way of getting an arbitrary number of lights at constant cost, and the radiosity comes for free, provided you're OK with a relatively static lighting environment.

Naturally this isn't for animated models.

 

[psurge]

Andrew - sorry if I'm being thick, but... huh?

Do you mean that the amount of incident radiance to a world surface is stored for multiple incoming light directions (perhaps using SH)?

Regards,
Serge

 

[Randell]

It will be interesting if FX5200 is defualtly placed in the DX9 category.

It will be interesting to find out.

nope it wont be - In that maxmum PC article (was in a different magazine in the UK, PC Zone I think) Valve clearly stated low-end DX9 hardware wouldn't be powerful enough to run DX9 effects (and that was before ATI's shader day).

 

[Andrew Meggs]

Do you mean that the amount of incident radiance to a world surface is stored for multiple incoming light directions

Very much like that, yes.

(perhaps using SH)?

I'm not sure if I can discuss the exact technique on this board -- I actually signed an NDA before viewing the Source source.

 

[KimB]

nope it wont be - In that maxmum PC article (was in a different magazine in the UK, PC Zone I think) Valve clearly stated low-end DX9 hardware wouldn't be powerful enough to run DX9 effects (and that was before ATI's shader day).

The "interesting" part was in the rest of my post. That is, it seems that there are a ton of detail settings between "DX7" and "DX9" rendering that have nothing to do with the featuresets of the respective architectures.

So the interesting part will be if, say, the owner of a GeForce FX 5200 will be able to turn on certain "DX9" effects, while leaving others off.

 

[NeoCool]

Hey, does anyone here have any screenshots with dx6/dx7/dx8/dx9 refrence sources to compare the LOD in hl2 with each range of hardware classes?

 

[KimB]

Hey, does anyone here have any screenshots with dx6/dx7/dx8/dx9 refrence sources to compare the LOD in hl2 with each range of hardware classes?

Since HL2 isn't released yet, you won't find much in the way of comparisons like this.

 

[Ailuros]

So the interesting part will be if, say, the owner of a GeForce FX 5200 will be able to turn on certain "DX9" effects, while leaving others off.

Wireframe should be quite interesting

 

[KimB]

So the interesting part will be if, say, the owner of a GeForce FX 5200 will be able to turn on certain "DX9" effects, while leaving others off.

Wireframe should be quite interesting

Um. No.

I was talking about things like the "detail props" that would eat up quite a bit of fillrate. Stuff like that could be turned off or down, while other things that might not eat up nearly as much fillrate, such as the "soft render to texture shadows" might work with little to no performance hit (depending on how they're implemented, of course).

The basic point was that it seems silly to lump hardware the way Valve seems to be doing it. I hope more specific detail options are available (they definitely should be...).

 

[Randell]

So the interesting part will be if, say, the owner of a GeForce FX 5200 will be able to turn on certain "DX9" effects, while leaving others off.

It was just referring to shaders IIRC, it was the whole rendering load of the DX9 path I think.

 

[KimB]

So the interesting part will be if, say, the owner of a GeForce FX 5200 will be able to turn on certain "DX9" effects, while leaving others off.

It was just referring to shaders IIRC, it was the whole rendering load of the DX9 path I think.

Look at the first post in this thread. The settings for the different DirectX version support levels appear to encompass things that are much more broad that just shaders (model LOD, terrain LOD, foliage, texture detail, etc.).

 

[Dave Baumann]

Valve made the statement "treat 5600/5200 as DX8" which doesn't limit itself to just shaders.

 

[Sxotty]

Great info Dave.

Any hint on weather or not they can make a X-mas date for shipment?

The weather should be cold unless, but that depends on whether you live in the nothern hemisphere.

Sorry I had too, as HUMUS pointed out the spelling errors are becoming humorous. I think that predictions will be about as accurate as a weather forecast for christmas at this point .

 

[Randell]

So the interesting part will be if, say, the owner of a GeForce FX 5200 will be able to turn on certain "DX9" effects, while leaving others off.

It was just referring to shaders IIRC, it was the whole rendering load of the DX9 path I think.

Look at the first post in this thread. The settings for the different DirectX version support levels appear to encompass things that are much more broad that just shaders (model LOD, terrain LOD, foliage, texture detail, etc.).

yes I know, I mistyped wasn't as was