Hrm Truform on the 9000 - yes

[ben6]

Geesh 2 posts in 3 days when I said I would be taking a vacation. In any event , I've been a little confused on whether the 9000 or 9000 Pro support Truform, as there's nothing in the brochures indicating this one way or another and the Truform supporting games I've tried currently don't enable it : Myth III, RTCW, Soul Reaver 2, Serious Sam The Second Encounter and C+C Renegade. Not to mention, that not a single review on the 9000 so far has indicated it one way or another.

So I asked a buddy at ATI who's one of the people on their driver development team and here's what he had to say:

Hi there Ben,

The answer to your question is yes. However it will not be enabled until a future CATALYST driver. The current plan of record is it will be in CATALYST version 02.3. I am designing its functionality right now to be tied into our new cool control panel to give end users an easy way to turn it on or off.

Terry

 

[alexsok]

If I'm nost mistaken, RTCW & SS:SE support TRUEFORM...

How come it doesn't work?

 

[ben6]

alexok , currently, it's disabled in the drivers. Terry is one of the senior people on their driver teams.

 

[jb]

Ben,

thanks for the info and keep posting

 

[Mephisto]

The answer to your question is yes. However it will not be enabled until a future CATALYST driver. The current plan of record is it will be in CATALYST version 02.3. I am designing its functionality right now to be tied into our new cool control panel to give end users an easy way to turn it on or off.

This info is missleading. It may will be software support, as according to [H], RV250 doesn't have TruForm in hardware.

 

[Ascended Saiyan]

Mephisto,I doubt that would be so after all they've been touting with the R8500 that this is the only card that supports this feature.


On another note concerning the Rv250 aka Radeon 9000 it seems that they have removed one of the texture units,which would explain why the low bench no. we've been seeing.

 

[ben6]

yes , they removed one of the texture units but improved the texture cache . So while it is slower in multitexturing it's not 1/2 as fast in most cases.

Mephisto, I'm awaiting the response from the 9000 product manager. I'll clarify this once Stan gets back to me.

 

[SirXcalibur]

Mephisto,I doubt that would be so after all they've been touting with the R8500 that this is the only card that supports this feature.


On another note concerning the Rv250 aka Radeon 9000 it seems that they have removed one of the texture units,which would explain why the low bench no. we've been seeing.

I would agree with this statement. It seems very obvious that the card would have truform.
Why were you concerned ben6?

 

[ben6]

SirXcalibur , it just seemed strange no mention was made of it in any of thebrochures or reviews i've read of the 9000 . In fact the only mention , I've seen was saying it wasn't supported by HardOCP.

 

[Mephisto]

I would agree with this statement. It seems very obvious that the card would have truform.

This isn't obvious at all. Removing TruFom is just logical for an OEM part like this which has only 40 M transistors. They removed anything they do not need to get the "DX8" label. Unfortuanlty, everybody except [H] didn't notice this.

 

[ben6]

Or they don't bother to check the features out and see if they actually work or not. I am acutally playing two of the Truform enabled games and this stuck out which is another reason for the inquiry. I don't just do a intro, benchmark, conclusion in my reviews.

 

[ben6]

for the record it's hardware. It'll be slower than a 8500 because of the removal of the fixed function T+L unit and only having one vertex shader pipeline. - ATI PR

 

[ben6]

Sorry for the confusion. Here's the whole answer from the product manager of the Radeon 9000 Stanley Ossias:

Hi Ben,

the answer to your question is...

Not entirely. TRUFORM is hardware assisted in RADEON 9000 but much of the work is performed in software. The implementation is not complete at this point so we haven't promoted it much.

Regards,
Stan

 

[CMKRNL]

Not entirely. TRUFORM is hardware assisted in RADEON 9000 but much of the work is performed in software.


As Mephisto pointed out, it sounds like they removed a big chunk of the functionality from HW in order to reduce cost. Stan's comments tend to verify this although he mentions it's HW assisted. What does that mean exactly? The first pass in generating PN triangles is establishing the control points and tessellating the triangle. After that the normals are interpolated for the new surface based on the normals from the original triangle. Given this set of steps, it sounds to me like calculating the control points is at the very least done in SW. Given Stans comments that "much of" it is done in SW, it also makes sense that the tessellation is done at the driver level. Sounds to me like they then just run a shader to calculate the normals for the new vertices. It gets the job done, but would definitely take up more bus bandwidth and CPU cycles especially when you set the LOD factor fairly high.

 

[nggalai]

Hi Ben,

for the record it's hardware. It'll be slower than a 8500 because of the removal of the fixed function T+L unit and only having one vertex shader pipeline. - ATI PR

Now I AM confused. Is this your paraphrase of Stan's answer, or a second opinion (PR bloke) you posted?

ta,
-Sascha.rb

 

[ben6]

Sorry , the second statement I posted should be considered as gospel, as Stan Ossias is the product manager for the 9000 and 9000 Pro for ATI. the first statement is a 2nd hand statement, and was found to be slightly incorrect by the author (not me),

 

[Doomtrooper]

Hmmm Ben and I had this conversation

 

[Mephisto]

So the title of this thread is wrong based on the incorrect 2nd hand statement you got. It should be: Truform on Radeon 9000 - no. (meaning not in hardware and therefore mostly useless)

 

[Brent]

Thanks for the information Ben!

I was simply going on the information that ATI told us

Kyle talked to Chris Hook at ATI and gave me this info:

"Also I was told that with the TMU removed that the card no longer supports Truform done in hardware but wouldhave to do it in software of course."

Thanks for the clarrification

I can go add an update in my review stating this new information... and a link to b3d where i got it...

I'm only here to learn, if I get stuff wrong or mis-information feel free to let me know if you wish! I don't claim to know everything, i will listen


So lets get this clear it DOES do truform in hardware, just slower because of no fixed T&L and only 1 TMU? right?

What will this new catalyst driver release add to the truform them? you said you had it running is that with current driver or an unreleased driver?

 

[Althornin]

what does a TMU have to do with Truform?