Hi all I use ID3DX::Effect of DX9 for my shaders.

I have a skinned mesh and coded my own .fx shader but I have this problem where some of my models have 64+ bones and if I declare a Matrix4x4 array of 64 indices or more, the shader doesn't work.

There's no error loading the .fx file, my models just won't appear on screen.

Doesn't work:

float4x4 Bones[64] : WORLDMATRIXARRAY;

Works:

float4x4 Bones[59] : WORLDMATRIXARRAY;

I declare some other variables in the shader aswell. But not many.

I declare VS_2_0 and PS_2_0 in the Technique part of the .fx file. (Maybe there's a limit of .fx size because of this lower version the Vertex Shader?)

Anyone has a suggestion on how to resolve this problem?

Yes, you can use it on D3D9 as long as the GPU supports vertex texture fetch.

By the way, the matrices used for skinning are actually 4x3 ones, so you can fit more like 80 of them in if you rearrange how the data is stored.

As MJP said, Any GPU that's DX10 capable will support vertex texture fetch (which is simply using tex2d in the vertex shader).

These days that's pretty much everything. You have to go back to something like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_X1000_Series to find a card that doesn't support it.

I thought I'd use this thread to ask a relevant question, but for DX11.

HLSL:

tbuffer SkinnedMatrices : register(t2)
{
	float4x4 Matrices[2097152];
};

When trying to compile (SM4.0) this the compiler gives the following error:

"vertexshader.hlsl(33,11-27): error X3059: array dimension must be between 1 and 65536"

So the maximum tbuffer size is 65536 x 16 x 4 = 4194304 Bytes, or 4MB.

But a 2048x2048 texture using 4 bytes per pixel is 16 MB large. So why can't tbuffers be as large as textures?