What Are The Benefits Of Having More Vertex Shader Pipes?

[Jabjabs]

The Matrox Parhelia had a solution to displacement mapping and LOD on it back in 2002 but as we all know that card was never heard of ever again.

 

[3dcgi]

I'm the most curious about what devs think of displacement mapping. Will the tesselator and displacement mapping see any real action? Or will they both, and HOS, be relegated to the junkpile (which seems like familiar territory for HOS, in general). It seems like one could implement displacement mapping (with tesselation to save on polygon set up) in fewer instructions than say parallax occlusion mapping, with the benefit of silhouettes appearing correctly.

Tesselation doesn't save polygon setup. As ERP said a benefit is geometry compression which yields reduced bandwidth and disc space.

 

[Kaotik]

nvm

 

[Megadrive1988]

At the risk of being painfully obvious, more vertex shader pipes means more polygons.

to support what Inane Dork said, more vertex shader pipes means having more
geometry processors ~ geometry engines ~ T&L units to computate / calculate / transform more polygons / vertices.

okay, that's basicly the old style.

the benefit of vertex shaders, besides more polys, i guess is more animation control.

 

[OtakingGX]

Just an idea, but couldn't you use a large number of vertex shaders to create a motion blur effect? Render the pixels in a scene and buffer those. Use vertex shaders to deform the scene (backwards). Then re-render with the new vertex locations and an alpha value (so the final pixel location is the base color and the trail is transparent on top of it).

 

[3dcgi]

Yes, vertex shaders can be used for motion blur. I believe there are some D3D SDK samples that do this.

 

[Hardknock]

To add to the discussion, here some things I found on the net that more Vertices can help with:

Procedural Geometry (cloth simulation, soap bubble [Isidoro/Gosslin])
Advanced Vertex Blending for Skinning and Vertex Morphing (tweening) [Gosselin]
Texture Generation [Riddle/Zecha]
Advanced Keyframe Interpolation (complex facial expression and speech)
Particle System Rendering
Real-Time Modifications of the Perspective View (lens effects, underwater effect)
Advanced Lighting Models (often in cooperation with the pixel shader) [Bendel]
First Steps to Displacement Mapping [Calver]