New ATi Demo
- Thread starter Caprice
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Here's the hacked skin shader
http://www.modeemi.fi/~jpaana/crowd_hack_shader.zip, needs the latest wrapper dll to go with it. The sushi.ati file is just a .zip file so you can get any shader you want from it easily and hack to your heart's content as the engine first checks if there is a replacement file in the directory before going to the pack file.
http://www.modeemi.fi/~jpaana/crowd_hack_shader.zip, needs the latest wrapper dll to go with it. The sushi.ati file is just a .zip file so you can get any shader you want from it easily and hack to your heart's content as the engine first checks if there is a replacement file in the directory before going to the pack file.
Made a multipassed version of the shader, it's still in http://www.modeemi.fi/~jpaana/crowd_hack_shader.zip, including both a slightly faster three pass version (ambient occlusion, base, specular) and proper four pass version with fog, which doesn't seem to have that much effect on the final output though. Just copy the oCrowdSkRandom.fog.ssh over oCrowdSkRandom.ssh to see it.
It seems some people misunderstood my text above, you DON'T have to touch sushi.ati at all to use the new shader, just unpack it to Shaders\Crowd directory under the demo (ie. unzip with paths to the demo folder, it should have the paths correctly, or I've messed something up). The mention about the file being .zip was just in case you want to mess with the other shaders in Ati demos using the Sushi engine.
Nebuchadnezzar
Legend
English please (though I understood everythingKAI|Nick said:Hij kan de pixel shader niet laden....ik heb een gemodde radeon 9500
waar haal ik die pixel shader vandaan?
)DemoCoder said:
The amount of criticism nVidia received for nV3x probably would have been reduced by 90% had nVidia chosen a path of at least general veracity throughout the entirety of 2003 for its nV3x PR promotions. It's ironic that all of their attacks on 3dMk (which came in a flood after nVidia cheated the bench and got caught at it), and in-game benchmarks of the type included originally in TR: AoD (which the publisher actually erased from the game at the behest of nVidia), and many, many other things, only served to amplify and underscore the very nV3x product deficiencies nVidia PR was determined to camouflage.
I'd say that fully 90% of the criticism nVidia got from nV3x was not actually related to nV3x at all, but was related to the stark disparities between the actual nV3x products themselves and the yarns nVidia was spinning, incessantly, about them. For nV3x nVidia started it all off with a bang with its bold and unapologetic prevarication that nV30/5/8 were eight-pixel-pipe gpus, a fiction still maintained to this day, I believe, in the nV3x promotionals (and product boxes) deployed by some nVidia AIB partners still selling nV3x products. It was all downhill from there--but didn't have to be, is the point I'm making.
Considering the cancellation of nV30 and the yield problems nVidia had with nV35/8 for most of '03, this is all doubly ironic as there was little practical need whatever for nVidia to prevaricate, equivocate, obfuscate and attempt to manipulate public opinion on gpus it couldn't bring to market in sufficient quantity to have a competitive impact--even if they had succeeded in their negative, anti-"DX9" PR campaign. As it was their rhetoric last year suceeded only in highlighting the manufacturing problems they were having with nV3x, and in defining what was "wrong" with nV3x instead of what was "right" about it, and as such completely boomeranged.
It was an absolutely awful PR campaign--probably the worst I've ever seen. Trying to sell negatives and easily refuted prevarications breaks all classical rules of good PR. It's not surprising, therefore, that it doesn't work. Look for instance at Intel's recent brief, aborted efforts to sell the negative that "nobody needs x86-64"...
It's to Intel's credit that the company changed its mind completely and quickly, wisely bowing to market demands instead of fixating on its own internal agendas. The problem with trying to convince people that they "don't need" something other products offer but yours lacks is human nature itself--quickest way to get someone to do something is to tell them they can't do it, and telling people about what they don't need is the quickest way to make them decide they need it...In short, the criticisms nVidia endured for nV3x had much less to do with nV3x than they had to do with the unfortunate and short-sighted ways in which nVidia chose to attempt to promote nV3x. That is certainly the case for me.
Again, you seem to miss the obvious, which is that ATi PR does not = nVidia PR, which explains the difference in "attack rate" you're talking about...
It's the often overstated, pompous, inflated, hyperbolic, often misleading and incomplete--did I mention "wordy"?--nVidia PR presentation characterizing its "new features" that puts people off. ATi PR is wisely content to let its products themselves do most of the talking, and if anything, in comparison to nVidia PR, ATi PR is a master of understatement. You can see this going back to the launch of the 9700P in '02. ATi didn't launch R300 with a gaudy, Hollywood-esque, peep-showish, carnival-esque "The World of 3d is About to Change Planet Earth Forever" melodramtic PR blitz, as we saw with nVidia's tacky "Dawn of Cinematic Computing" paper launch for nV30 that so vastly overstated the capabilities of nV30 that the whole thing turned into a bitter parody of nV30 when Dawn bit the dust when nV30 got the ax.
You are just a lot better off understating your feature set for a lot of good reasons--not the least of which is that if one of them doesn't deliver on its theoretical potential you won't get much criticism about it since you never overstated and overbilled the feature in the first place. OTOH, if that feature turns out to be really great and lives up to its promise, but you've understated it, neutral 3rd parties will be screaming from the aisles as to how "insanely great" it is, because it will have *surprised* them, and they will not feel as though the company ever tried to sell them a bill of goods about it. IMO, competence in the art of effective PR understatement is how you can separate the "men" from the "boys" in terms of the relative quality of PR departments.
Really, if you look back at some of the nVidia PR coming from the company in '99-'00, at the height of the nVidia-3dfx wars, you can see that in comparison to the overblown hyperbole sometimes coming out of 3dfx PR at the time, which was often negative, defensive, and dictatorial in tone (ring a bell?), it was ironically nVidia PR at that point in time that used understatement much more effectively than 3dfx. Seriously, the fact is that the more nVidia overstates its products and associated features through pompous PR bluster the less credible such claims become to a significant number of people--me included--and the more suspicious such claims become.
It goes back to the truism that "all that glitters is not gold," a reality of life that some people understand and some people never do. For instance, I once met and briefly chatted with a man whom I knew for a fact was worth $100M US., at least. He was as unassuming a person as I have ever met, wore a frayed shirt and ordinary jeans, drove a 5-year old car with a big dent in the side, and went out of his way to let people know when he talked to them that he wasn't judging them by the size of their bank accounts, but by the quality of their characters, which he considered of far more importance. (He is not a politician, if that's what you're thinking--which is inestimably to his credit....
) In fact, if I hadn't known who he was in advance of the appointment, I'd never have given him a second glance or thought of him as anything but absolutely of average economic means--which is exactly the way he chooses to portray himself publicly. This kind of person is rare, imo, and is doubly effective and persuasive because of the manner in which he employs understatement. OTOH, I've got a few associates and casual friends who wear garish diamond-studded $5k Rolex watches, wear Armani suits, drive Porches, and generally look like they've stepped out of the latest Bond movie, whom I know for a fact often struggle to meet the monthly light bill and are so far in debt for all of that crap that they regularly hit me up for "bridge loans" (it's a "bridge loan," you see, instead of just a "loan," as that would be too vulgar a way to describe what they are groveling to get from me if possible) which they invariably need while "awaiting the maturity" of this or that "investment turned to gold" or T-bills or bonds or whatnot.
The only pertinent point I get out of these conversations that I can verify is that they are currently broke, their personal credit lines "temporarily stymied by negative economic serendipity" and so forth. I once half-jokingly suggested to such an acquaintance (who had neatly pinned me in an elevator to broach his request privately) that he might wish to hock his Rolex (or whatever it was glinting from his wrist) at the local pawn shop to effect his bridge loan, and was quite unprepared for the reaction it provoked.
He grew red in the face and looked down and away from me as though I had thrashed him, and then chokingly confided in me, "I can't! You see, it's a fake! My wife's brother gave it to me last Christmas, and she *insists* that I wear it! She's never known it is a fake. Please, don't let this get out--it would devastate my wife!" I allayed his fears about that, but was so amused by the obvious dodge, and the speed of his response (fast on his feet), that I loaned him something of what he asked.
Anyway, my point is only that appearances can be deceiving, and so can PR. I think such differences as you note between the general levels of skepticism evoked by the two companies can be directly attributed to the different character of PR each company employs to promote its products.
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