Does anyone know if future versions of directx and graphics hardware will be able to support custom render target texture formats? So that the bits per pixel can be allocated to any number of channels that all can have different bit counts individually? Just thinking how useful it would be, especially with deferred shading and wouldn't need to use cycles in packing and unpacking data. It would also mean you could store more channels in one render target and use less MRTs. I don't know much about directx 10 but i'm guessing it doesn't allow this yet. I guess even if it was available it wouldn't be nearly as fast as using static formats. Anyone know much about this?

Quote:Original post by jrmcv
...and wouldn't need to use cycles in packing and unpacking data.
It would also mean you could store more channels in one render target and use less MRTs.

I'm guessing that if the hardware was to implement a generic model like you suggest, then it would *always* be performing some kind of packing/unpacking internally (like when the CPU does an unaligned read).

Yeah i guess I just thought it would be faster if you had dedicated hardware for doing it. Apparently directx 10 allows integers in shaders and if you can do bitwise operations then that maybe just as good.

I wouldn't hold your hopes up for this sort of feature in the near future. It's more likely that pressure for new HDRI/Compressed/Deferred formats will result in a new DXGI_FORMAT_* entry in a future release than the IHV's allowing for a completely arbitrary binary format.

As has been mentioned, the bitwise operators and integer instruction set of D3D10 (and beyond) should allow reasonably elegant solutions to your problem.

hth
Jack

ok thanks, I'm hoping to look more in to directx 10 when I have finished this project.