Anyway, in case anyone's interested:
ATI's new R520 hardware - no SM3 vertex texturing..
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:
Anyway, in case anyone's interested:
FYI, Jack, your email is bouncing (which is why you're not getting reply notifications):
User jhoxley not listed in Domino Directory
User jhoxley not listed in Domino Directory
This is very frustrating. I have been buying Nvidia cards for test machines to test all of shader 3.0s beauty. Now I suspose it wont help much for ATI's 3.0 support. Its kinda hard to knock out the high % of ati users. Maybe they will start to see the light and just go after the 7x00 series nvidia for the next gens.
Author
Quote:Original post by Myopic Rhino
FYI, Jack, your email is bouncing (which is why you're not getting reply notifications):
User jhoxley not listed in Domino Directory
Thanks for the heads-up. Seems like I forgot to change my email address from my work account when I left the company 2 months ago. Whoops [oh]
Quote:This is very frustrating. I have been buying Nvidia cards for test machines to test all of shader 3.0s beauty. Now I suspose it wont help much for ATI's 3.0 support.
So far it's only this one major feature that ATI seemed to have differed on. Maybe there are more... but in general, the rest of the ATI-SM3 implementation seems fairly respectable.
Quote:Maybe they will start to see the light and just go after the 7x00 series nvidia for the next gens.
I doubt it. The benchmarks that matter to the end user ("which card makes my games look prettiest and run fastest?") indicate that the ATI X1x00 cards are at the very least competing with the Gf7x00's and sometimes beating them.
This ATI card might annoy us developers and not really offer us much more than what NV have been doing for a while, we're a relatively small percentage of potential customers [rolleyes]
Jack
hmm.... I´m not getting anywhere near SM3.0 this year I guess.... first have to brush up my skills in the basics section of that 3D stuff. Still I think that s*cks big time... 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? Of course there are some tricks for NVidia and ATI cards to get more performance out of them, but if I understand it correctly, ATI effectively abuses the SM3.0 for advertising purposes on the outside of their boxes, without really complying with it, therefore forcing developers to do twice the work, if they want to use SM3.0 in their app? bleh....
Author
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
There is more: the R520 doesn't have filtering for FP textures.
This is very very annoying...
This is very very annoying...
Author
Quote:Original post by KronosGL
There is more: the R520 doesn't have filtering for FP textures.
This is very very annoying...
Do you have a link/reference for that?
this page from the B3D article includes this fragment:
Quote:ATI have supported various HDR methods since the introduction of R300 with its floating point texturing capabilities, however NVIDIA have supported a more optimal method of High Dynamic Range blending, something that ATI's part have not been able to previously. With the entire range of chips using the R520 architecture ATI will now support HDR blending, but will do so under a number of formats:
* FP16 - 64-bit floating point
* Int16 - 64-bit integer
* Int10 - 32-bit 10-10-10-2
* Custom formats (eg Int10+L16)
Cheers,
Jack
Quote:Original post by jollyjeffers
Do you have a link/reference for that?
this page from the B3D article includes this fragment:Quote:ATI have supported various HDR methods since the introduction of R300 with its floating point texturing capabilities, however NVIDIA have supported a more optimal method of High Dynamic Range blending, something that ATI's part have not been able to previously. With the entire range of chips using the R520 architecture ATI will now support HDR blending, but will do so under a number of formats:
* FP16 - 64-bit floating point
* Int16 - 64-bit integer
* Int10 - 32-bit 10-10-10-2
* Custom formats (eg Int10+L16)
Cheers,
Jack
What does that have to do with floating point texture filtering? ATI only allows point filtering, no mipmaping or anisotropic.
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r520/index.php?p=03
Texture processing is achieved in a similar fashion to ATI's previous parts. Although the earlier pipeline diagram indicates a texture sampler array, all the the texture units are not re-allocatable to different pipelines, instead 4 are dedicated to each of the quads. At present ATI see the primary use of float texture sampling as being for lookup data, which only requires point sampling, and so at present haven't put floating point texture filtering in place, instead relying on filtering in the shader if required
Author
Quote:Original post by KronosGL
What does that have to do with floating point texture filtering? ATI only allows point filtering, no mipmaping or anisotropic.
Okay, good point - you win [smile]
I misread the "blending" as "filtering".
Sucks that they don't see it as a "primary use". My recent HDR Demo looks a *lot* nicer/smoother when running under the REF where all the FP data is linearly filtered.
The thing with implementing it in the shader is that it makes it just that little bit more complex to implement - even if it is only ~30 more instructions. Guess in light of what I started this thread about I/we shouldn't be too surprised [rolleyes].
Thanks,
Jack
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement