Sony Involvement/Interest in Nvidia's Cg: Some Info

[Farid]

Link to another B3D Thread

Yes, Sony's involvement with Cg has been very positive - for some time now. Much of the Cg 1.5 feature set is due to their vision for shader/content management.

Cass Everitt is working on Cg, the High Level Shader Language and Shader composer too, now, solution from Nvidia.

Some people were wondering if Sony would use Cg at all since there was very little talk about that part of the Nvidia/Sony deal. Now, you have the answer.

 

[Gholbine]

If Sony (or developers) weren't to use Cg for shaders, what would be another solution from what we know about the system as of now?

 

[Farid]

They could/can use OpenGL Shading Language, A.K.A. GSLang or they could go the old fashioned way, and write their Shaders directly.

The latter is not that complex, especially for games developed for the PS3 only.
Of course if the game is Multi platform, the high level is the language, the better it is.

Furthermore, the third solution would be a proprietary High Level Shading Language.

 

[Geo]

Yeah, it was nice to get that on the record. A lot of people focus on the financial incentives to the IHVs and console makers of this kind of cross-leveraging we're seeing between both consoles and PC. Of course those are there and not inconsequential, but it is a goodness for gaming in general, imo, for this to happen as well.

 

[Panajev2001a]

If Sony (or developers) weren't to use Cg for shaders, what would be another solution from what we know about the system as of now?

They would write their own shader language and compiler or use RSX assembly for Vertex and Fragment programs as PSGL, based on an extended but still compliant OpenGL ES 1.x implementation, it is likely that PSGL 2.0 could be based on an extended OpenGL ES 2.0 which includes GL Shading Language support IIRC.