Quote:Original post by jollyjeffers

Quote:Original post by matches81
the shader models were supposed to be a standard of some kind, weren´t they? What good is a standard, if around 50% of sold hardware doesn´t comply with it exactly, but still says it does?

I don't have the exact D3D9 specs to hand, but from my understanding is that they state a minimum feature set to be SM2 or SM3 "compliant". Through the enumeration functions there is quite a lot of room for the IHV's to manouver. Hence why you can get different cards supporting different numbers of shader instructions (etc..) - so long as they support the minimum demanded by the spec.

As for advertising... do you know many end-user/gamers that'll know (or care) about the different vertex texturing implementations for ATI/NV? As long as thats the case I'm sure neither company will be too fussed about "blurring" the facts [grin]

hth
Jack

I know that the shader models are a set of minimum specs / abilities... but that´s exactly my point: If the info in this thread is correct, ATI´s next chip won´t fulfill those minimum specs, but it is still advertised as shader model 3 "compliant", which doesn´t seem to be the case.
Sure, no end-user will care, as long as the software developers (mainly game developers) find a way to get the wanted result, which was my point again. As a developer I would really love to see whether the hardware complies with shader model 3 and implement my shaders all the same for shader model 3 hardware, which I obviously can´t do when the ATI cards are unable to do some features that would be required for SM3 but still propagate they are. It seems I would have to write a completely different shader for the ATI cards, which I really dislike...

To make things short I simply dislike that ATI seems to expect something like special treatment when they could have done it the "standard" way, which results in more work for the devs.

Quote:Original post by remigius
Well, considering the SM3.0 specs seem to be more of a joint venture between NVidia and Microsoft, I can't really blame ATI. When I was looking to buy an X850 I made a little comparative sheet between the SM3.0 specs and the X850 specs (SM2.0b?) and it all comes down to glossy terms ATI can't legally use. The only true feature the X850 missed was the seperate progammable specular & fog shader. And of course with the whopping 255 shaders instructions missing for full SM3.0 compliance, you're gonna have a hard time with the 65280 instructions available ;p

Anyway, in case anyone's interested:

This is a piece of bullshit.

Shader length: The paper mixes Vertex- and Pixelshader-Length. Vertexshader-Length was not an issue on any Radeon Hardware. The Problem is the Pixelshader.
Dynamic branching: ATi could very well expose static and dynamic branching through Shadermodel 2.x. They don't. The card doesn't even have static branching in the PixelShader.
Back-Face Register: This is the only valid point.
Interpolated Color Format: This is the precision of the Interpolator-Registers. And R300 and R420 only have 8bit precision there.
MRT: ATi does expose 4 MRTs through Shader 2.x. This is no issue.
FOG and Specular: Yes it could done with the shader anyway.
Texture coordinate count: Texture coordinates have nothing to do with the maximum textures bound to samplers.

Please inform yourself before posting.