New ATi Demo

[hoom]

Yeah, because we really are finally getting to the point where we can have epic battles with tens of thousands of soldiers on the screen at once.
Rome:Total War is going to kick ass.

 

[WaltC]

I think one really exciting use would be for more organic environments. Imagine an island covered in trees, with each tree swaying in the wind slightly out of phase.

Kind of like I see in Far Cry 1.1 running on my 9800P at 1024x768x32, 4xFSAA, 16xAF (activated internally in the game)--like that, you mean? Lots of out-of-sync, swaying palm trees can be seen there--also lots of other-than-palm, out-of-sync swaying trees, too ...;D Lots of swaying grass, etc.

It will be nice when we can elevate the discussion from the marketing/theory level to the experiential level, won't it?

 

[Murakami]

T&L was very usable on the GF1 if i'm not mistaken,

giants was another. IT was actually faster to turn off tnl on my geforce sdr and on my sisters geforce ddr.

Evolva was clearly faster with T&L ON with GeForce 1 SDR and GeForce 2 MX..perhaps the most impressive DX7 game, in my humble opinion.

 

[jvd]

T&L was very usable on the GF1 if i'm not mistaken,

giants was another. IT was actually faster to turn off tnl on my geforce sdr and on my sisters geforce ddr.

Evolva was clearly faster with T&L ON with GeForce 1 SDR and GeForce 2 MX..perhaps the most impressive DX7 game, in my humble opinion.

can comment on it as I don't own it. NOtice I only comment on what i have .

 

[AlNom]

I allways thought it was the ai that limited the graphics of a rts and not the actual graphics cards .

oooh... good point.. just remembered seeing the benchmarks for warcraft 3.....always around 50-60fps....guess we all need procs double the speed of A64's

 

[Xmas]

Look at the introduction of 32 bit colour, 32 bit precision, FSAA, large textures, T&L, etc. All of these things were introduced as marketing tickboxes that took a generation further to get usable. It's one of the things that contributed greatly to Nvidia's success. By courting OEMs with these tickboxes, Nvidia was able to sell a lot of cards and make a lot of money.

Try to see it this way: by courting developers with these tickboxes, Nvidia was able to get them support those features

And all those features you mentioned were usable in the generation they were introduced, IMO. Not all of the time, but sometimes. NVidia wasn't early with those, 3dfx was hopelessly late (except FSAA).



WC3 is a bad example for "epic battles". And it's capped at 64fps.

 

[AlNom]

oh.... well, it's 1 of 2 RTS I play, and it's the only 3d one of the two.

It's actually capped at 64fps? why's that? same reason for Doom 3 capped at 60fps?

 

[archie4oz]

The r3x0 series though has no faults at all .

No paletted texture support.. NV3x hardware kept it... Granted looks like NV is tossing it in the NV4x, so I guess I can say yay for NV3x, poo poo on NV4x...

 

[Humus]

There are probably other uses for the vertex frequency divider besides "geometry instancing" that people haven't figured out yet.

Well, the way I understand it from the documentation it can be used to reduce storage space in some cases. For instance you wouldn't have to provide the same face normal for all three vertices in a triangle. But then you need to use another vertex stream for the normals, so it's not guarantueed that it will be faster.

 

[Humus]

For it to matter you need to have loads of objects, and each object must be very simple.

Something like drawing grass or leaves, no ? NV did a grassy field demo back in GF2 days, wonder if they'd do a rewrite for NV40.

Yes, but then why not put many of them in the same vertex buffer? Putting 100 grass straws into the same vertex buffer shouldn't take much memory.

 

[rainz]

How you make it run on a 9800 again ?

i always get the same msg .. dx9b / x800 blablabla

Thx

RainZ

 

[Ostsol]

Use the DX9 wrapper Colourless made for Ruby.

 

[rainz]

Use the DX9 wrapper Colourless made for Ruby.

aaaaaah ! ok thx Ostsol

rainZ

 

[rainz]

//=====================================================
// ATI Sushi Error Log Created 6/2/2004 10:35 pm
//=====================================================
[SSGenericAPI_D3D.cpp] (line 1312): No D3D Error message. You might be specifying more than one component on a source register.[oCrowdSkRandom.ssh] (line 288): Error creating Pixel Shader
[Main.cpp] (line 881): Normal Application Exit

I can see the background and only the shadows .. anything specific to do ?

RainZ

 

[Ostsol]

I can see the background and only the shadows .. anything specific to do ?

Aside from waiting 'till someone (Colourless) makes a work-around? Nope.

 

[rainz]

I can see the background and only the shadows .. anything specific to do ?

Aside from waiting 'till someone (Colourless) makes a work-around? Nope.

Well Go Colourless Go !!

RainZ

 

[Mendel]

so what feature is r300 lacking here in particular? Theres nothing rendered of the soldiers, even in wireframe mode I see nothing but the shadows. I could write maybe a basic replacement shader to get at least flat shaded characters but I have no idea where to place the shaders and what filename to give to them

 

[Colourless]

I'll look at it... eventually

 

[Hanners]

I'll look at it... eventually

After a few months in a darkened room since your last Herculean efforts no doubt.

 

[jpaana]

The soldier skin shader compiles to 98 arithmetic (plus 7 texture, iirc)instructions, which is over the 64 exposed by PS 2.0 and thus fails. I managed to get it to 64 by disabling specular and taking only one ambient occlusion term into account instead of default three so it looks a bit different but pretty ok still. I'll post is somewhere later today if no one else manages to make a better one before.