Interesting Benchmark Effects

[AndrewM]

Is there any reason why you aren't willing to use anything less than ARB_f_p? Things like ARB_v_b_p etc makes sense, but why not test geforce3/4's and 8500's while you're at it.

The most important reason is that I don't think there is a need for another DX8 benchmark. I think 3DMark2k1 and pretty much every game out there have it covered. In addition, I am only one person...I can't work on this full time and I want to get it done in a few months. I am not purposely excluding those cards, though. There may be a test or two that does not use fragment program. In that case, Geforce3/4/Radeon8500 should run them just fine.

I personally don't think that 3dmak2k1 is a good DX8 level benchmark. There's not a lot out there that is. UT2k3 doesnt really count in my books

I don't have a moral objection to vendor-specific optimizations, only a time objection. I have designed the basic framework so that it's easy to replace an ARB shader with a vendor-specific one later.

I haven't decided yet what sort of license I will release the benchmark under. Lots of things to consider here.

Open source it. Build a good framework so that you can replace it with different ones.

 

[Luminescent]

Zeno, I say you represent the noise function as a volume and that you post filter the volume with fragment programs after that. Give these vpu's no mercy.

Also, some nice pixel shader ray-tracing (limited, of course, but procedural, nonetheless), would be nice.

 

[[maven]]

I didn't find ray-tracing too be too limited (if you restrict yourself to convex objects and a RTT-pass )...
(Although reading back correctly (in a DX9 fragment shader) from the rendertarget is still incorrect and very troublesome)