ATI and Instancing, further investigation @ Driverheaven
Posted by: Newsfactory on: 07/25/2004 11:35 PM [ Print | 3 comment(s) ] · 1720 views
Yesterday we published details on FarCry 1.2, part of that editorial focused on the ability to enable Instancing on the Radeon X800 within FarCry. Since publishing the details we have been working with www.tommti-systems.de to get their Nvidia Instancing demo working on the X800. With very little trouble (only a change to the program which removed a SM3.0 check) Tommti provided a fixed exe and the demo was up and running.
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dlolos Unregistered |
#55358 Posted on: 07/26/2004 12:24 AM
I can almost hear the Nvidiots saying "it's only partial precision Instancing". |
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MagamiAKO Unregistered |
#55373 Posted on: 07/26/2004 12:13 PM
No, You will hear someone state that if the function was fully available on the ATI hardware, that ATi would announce that they support it. As I stated in my previous post, I'm wondering why ATI hasn't stated that they actually support it. There has to be some reason, somewhere. With that being the case, I don't see where Crytek nor Nvidia are at fault. This so-called 'instancing' seems to be a function that is asked to be available in SM3, but that doesn't mean other chips can't have it. For example, the Matrox Parhelia was the first card to have Hardware Displacement Mapping functions, but that doesn't necessarily mean the card is VS3.0 compliant. So it has a check for 3.0 support before it uses this feature. Big deal. Fact of the matter is, I have never once seen anything stating what or what not the ATI hardware supports. Since ATI has been rather quiet on the issue, what is the developer to do? If ATI doesn't officially say they support it, then that means that they probably haven't worked out all the bugs with it, and enabling it COULD lead to some problems. You never know. But it all comes down to that this really is nothing to make some big commotion about. Nvidia card supports features, Crytek takes advantage of them. ATI doesn't state that their hardware supports features (instead says they're not that big of a deal, hmm), and so they aren't used. The problem is....? |
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TSThomas Junior Member Posts: 2 Joined: 2003-05-10 |
#55377 Posted on: 07/26/2004 09:08 PM
"The same rule applies to geometry instancing for ATI - It is mightily impressive that their hardware as far back as the Radeon 9500 supports this feature, and it's good to see ATI still supporting their older hardware by enabling features such as this and Temporal anti-aliasing, rather than keeping it just to their current high-end boards. However, the fact that this feature is only supported 'officially' as part of the Vertex Shader 3.0 specification, and thus needs a workaround in both drivers and the application to work on ATI cards could prove something of a difficult hurdle when it comes to having the feature enabled in games. It'll be most interesting to see what kind of success ATI have in pushing the adoption of this feature for their own hardware over the next year or so." |
