Matt-IGN to reveal some Revolution technical specs tonight ?

[pc999]

It's like "real" vs "fake" HDR. The fact is computer graphics merely approximate the real world (or, at least, a hypothetical world). Arguing about which is the "true" approximation of the world is, in my estimation, patently ridiculous. Some approximations use more data, some use less. Some are more accurate, some are less. But none of them are "real" in the slightest. The question should never be "Is this the true way or the false way?" but rather, "How good does the result look?"

Completely agree with you on that, for me they can use magic that I dont care, howerver I pointed that just to show that i may have a big performance lost.

I have a doubt but...

Is possible to make all the DX 9.0/OpenGL 2.0 FX with fixed hardware in the form of small specialized DSP?

Perhaps Revolution is a new architecture without Shaders but capable of doing the same image quality of a DX 9.0 card with things like High Dynamic Range.

Probably, but that goes against the point of having programable shaders, you can always put hardwired HW to make things much faster at a much lower cost, but those transistores cant be used to anything else beyond that.

 

[pc999]

Interview Date: January 2006


Um, did you guys not see this. This is straight from ATI. Not based off of Flipper. End of story, regardless of what Matt says.

Is this from the RevolutionReport interviewn?

 

[3dcgi]

Environment mapping, fur shading and water effects are certainly attempts to make up for lack of real geometry. For instance pixel shaded water is simply putting random shading patterns on the surface of the water in order to give the illusion that there are actually ripples in the water. If you had enough geometry to actually model the whole surface of the water and all the ripples ect on it then shaders wouldn't be neccesary.

Shaders would still be useful, just the mix of vertex and pixel shaders would shift to more vertex shaders.

 

[Teasy]

No, you would still need some kind of shaders to tell the ripples how to appropriately color.

I don't see why you would need pixel shaders to create shadows in ripples of water.

To the rest of your post, yeah I agree that pixel shaders are useful in lots of ways even with unlimited geometry. I just think that in the cases I pointed to pixel shaders are very often used to make up for a lack of geometry.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

Could Nintendo have both, hardwired features and pixel shaders, or could ATI just have slightly reworked the TEV to be more flexible?

This may explain why so many GC patents have been updated over pass couple of years, maybe there's some differences in them compared to the GC documentation thats available to developers.