programmable clipping

Humus,

Just Cause 2 - pic? ...Looks great.

I loved JC1 can't wait for 2.

 

humus im not sure what you mean by that any game that had huge draw distances would also let you see things right next to you

ps: since your here would it be difficult to write an app (remembering dxoveride) that exports the cap "NONPOW2CONDITIONAL" to a game

 

The depth buffer isn't fixed between a range of values - it's set by the application (using the near and far z planes). However, with a 32-bit depth buffer, you only have ~4 billion different values, with an exponential falloff in precision the further away you get from the camera.

An application could arbitrarily say that it measured distances in lightyears, and set their far z plane 10^30 units away. Then the application would have a draw distance of 10^30 lightyears - but good luck representing day-to-day distances (metres) at any sort of precision with those settings.

The point is that actual numbers of distance don't matter - it's the ratios.

 

With a float Z buffer shader precision is more of an issue than Z buffer precision.

Making claims about "the nature of the z-buffer" without even knowing what it's used for is not a good basis for discussion.

 

Nope. That's the first pic that showed up on a google image search on "Just Cause".

Just modifying the caps bit shouldn't be too hard I guess.

With a floating point z-buffer and a reversed projection matrix (far plane = 0, near = 1) you get a pretty even precision distribution across the whole range.

 

Oh Mighty Humus, be aware that I am currently in the process of assembling an international team of crimson skies fans we are going to fly to sweden kidnap you, tie you to a chair and poke you with a pointy stick untill you promise to fix the game.

here's the official explaination from nvidia it may help.

"The reason for the corruption is because the game doesn't check correctly for the support of Nonpower of two textures. The Forceware driver now have an unlimited support for Nonpow2 textures. That means we don't export the caps NONPOW2CONDITIONAL anymore. However the game misinterprets this as we don't support Pow2 and/or nonpow2 textures."

Do not take this lightly we do have a Rubber Chicken and are not afraid to use it...........

 

I have written a tool to change every single caps bit some time ago. Must be somewhere on my hard disk.

 

/Goes out to buy a second rubber chicken

is it called directx tweaker i found beta 3 but when i run it it says expired

 

I don't understand. How can you ask a question like this:

and make a statement like this

in the same post at a place like this with a straight face?

 

Im going to horrify you now IQ, nvidia only have a 24bit zbuffer

 

Read this paper.

To summarize, fp32 complementary z buffer has enough precision that you start to become limited by your vertex data precision, so the depth buffer resolution is a total non-issue anymore.

fp32 depth buffers are required by DX10, so you can stop complaining about depth buffer precision on any modern hardware!

 

Both are linear, but in different ways. The W-buffer is linear in scene depth, but it's non-linear pixel-to-pixel in screen space. A Z-buffer is linear pixel-to-pixel in screen space, but non-linear in scene depth. Intuitively the W-buffer sounds like the better choice, unless you're the one designing the hardware. The linearity in screen-space of Z-buffer means you can create much simpler hardware for interpolating Z, it also means that the resulting Z values are highly compressible which makes techniques like Z-compression possible. The disadvantage is that precision is distributed in a non-linear fashion. However, if you're working with floating point numbers, which are non-linear in themselves, you can make the non-linearities sort of cancel each other out. That's what the inverted projection is all about. If you map the far plane to 0 and near to 1, you get a depth distribution that's not quite linear, but good enough, while maintaining the advantages of a Z-buffer.

 

Ok, let's recap:

"Awesome! Great draw distance!"


"Boo! Z-buffer artifacts!"



Seems a bit weird to me, but let's try another set of pictures, I think I start to understand what you're trying to say.

Now IQ, which of these pictures would you say is more w-buffered?
This one:


Or this one:

 

ps: the "Boo! Z-buffer artifacts!" picture
doesnt have any Z-buffer artifacts its alaising
not enough pixels to draw the trees properly


ps: regarding the jedi outcast/academy pics
looks like the 2nd pic has af applied