next gen consoles to increase importance of sm 3/opengl?

There was meaning, at least to the glass of water with the candle floating in it...

 

:O

I found that way too amusing. Must be because it's 3 AM.

 

Broken architectures don't happen often. Counting on another one, well, doesn't make sense.

 

There are always failures, we just don't ever get to see them. Think of PureVideo? I guess there are at least ten major workarounds in SW for the broken HW in every chip generation.

 

LOL, I was referring to my post being meaningless and not the event you took part in, Dave. Looks like you're still cozy with the ATI boys, nevertheless, which means I'll be on the lookout for lots of cryptic R520 posts in the next couple of months.

 

Well, buggy hardware happens....but hardware that is unfixable is rare.

 

OGL ES v2.0 will provide support for GLSL, I believe this is how the programming ability of PS3 gpu is exposed.
http://www.khronos.org/opengles/review/OpenGLESLanguageTOC1.10.4.pdf

And nVIDIA will be giving a speech about OGL ES in GDC 2005, I'm almost certain it'll be related to PS3 to some extent.

 

While GLSL may also be supported, it just makes much more sense to use Cg for console development (since there's more access direct access to the compiler, and lower-level optimizations are possible).

 

I was under the impression that the GLSLang compiler in the NV drivers was a version of the CG compiler.

Someone (I can't find the post now) alluded that this was the case and posted some santax comparisons of some functions to show this was the case.

---
EDIT: found the post :

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11959&highlight=glsl

 

IMO, SM3 will be very important. SM4 will "suffer" (less enthusiastic software support) because of SM3. SM2 will probably just ultimately vanish. Seems logical to me anyway.

[edit] ON a related note, this topic seems similar to my post earlier with my musings.

 

That may well be, but GLSL doesn't offer the option to examine the compiled code, so it'd be rather unoptimal for a console (by contrast, I think GLSL's near-perfect for PC development...the only thing it's missing is compiled object files, such that one can allow the drivers to take a long time in shader compiling, and just cache compiled shaders).

 

I'd would say that its too early to tell much at all given the spread of titles that are using anything at the moment. We don't know exactly where the consoles will fall and at the moment Longhorn's standards are SM2.0 (WGF1.0) and SM4.0 (WGF2.0) - the net result will be that SM2.0 will be the baseline hardware support for any Longhorn compliant graphics; on the console side its likely that they will exceed SM3.0's capabilities, but for initial titles they may well end up fitting within DX9's SM3.0 spec (or less) whilst a few years on, as developers dig into the hardware a little more, DX9's SM3.0 capabilities are likely to be exceeded.

 

You don't know what? The specs of the next-gen consoles, the sales of the next-gen consoles or the developer software support for these next-gen consoles?

 

Yes, Nvidia's GLSL compiler is Cg with a different front end, and it can output the "ASM". I would expect a High Level language to be used for next gen console dev, but to be compiled to and run from some lower level format.

On PS3 - nvidia's opengl extensions for that hardware.
On xbox2 - some directx shader model for ati hardware (kinda like 2.0b).

 

X-Box 2 should be based on next-generation technology, not SM2 or even SM3 (same with the PS3 core).

 

Compiled object files are on their way... http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/notes/meeting_note_2004-12-07.html#ogl21

 

Well, actually, technically all of the above. I have a fairly good idea of where one will fall and my latter point WRT titles developed for the platform stands. At present we don’t know where PS3 and Revolution will go hardware wise and we don’t know what influences they will have on the PC in the future.

I don’t think he was suggesting that it would be SM2.b, merely illustrating that there will be a profile tailored towards ATI’s shader capabilities like SM2.b now.

 

Well, from how little was said about it in the notes, that's hardly heartening.