X-Plane 9 currently recognizes (roughly) three categories of graphics hardware:
- Non-Pixel-Shader hardware (GeForce 2,3,4, Radeon 7000-9200)
- First-Generation Shader Hardware (GeForce FX 5nnnn, Radeon 9500-9800, X300-X600)
- Later-Generation Shader Hardware (GeForce 6, 7, 8, Radeon X200, Radeon X700+)
That first bucket is pretty simple: those cards don’t support programmable pixel shaders (as we know them today) and can’t run any shader effects. The “use pixel shaders” check box doesn’t appear in the rendering settings.
The distinction between the later two is a little bit more subtle. Basically the first generation of pixel shader cards (the 9700 and friends) support only 96 instructions for each pixel shader; this puts us right on the edge of sometimes not being able to draw all of our effects; we have to simplify the water slightly to make it work. The next generation of chips (X850 and friends) doesn’t have this limitation.
By comparison, while NVidia cards have been able to handle long shaders from day one, the GeForce 5’s shader performance is really poor.
So we bucket all of these chips as “first-gen”. When we detect this we:
- Simplify shaders slightly (gets us out of trouble with the 9700).
- Don’t default to shaders being on when the sim is first booted (because the framerate will probably be unusably slow).
Even though the 9700 provided very usable shader performance in its day, by the standards of modern GPUs, this older chip isn’t that fast, so it’s probably for the best that we not enable reflective water by default on machines with these cards.
By comparison, X-Plane deals with almost all other capabilities on an a-la-carte basis; particualr features are enabled if the right menu of hardware features is available. We do this to try to deal more flexibly with the wide variety of cards that are out there. Some examples:
- You’ll get hardware accelerated runway lights if your card supports pixel shaders and sprites (virtually all shader-enabled cards have sprites).
- You’ll get sun-glare effects if your card supports pixel counting (virtually all modern cards can do this).
- The non-pixel-shader rendering code will show more detail if your card supports more texture units (this is only an issue with very old hardware).
I’ve been looking over hardware profiles a lot lately, and I suspect that the next big “jump” in hardware will be the DX10-compliant cards (GeForce 8, Radeon HD). There’s a lot of fine print in what the various cards can do between all of the pre-DX10 cards; at some point when we decide what menu of features we’ll require for rendering, we need to simplify.
My guess is that when we start to have “really advanced” pixel shaders that require hardware more sophisticated than what we need now, we’ll simply require a DX10 card. Otherwise we’ll have to sort through 8 different profiles of fine print, only to attempt to partially support cards that probably won’t be fast enough anyway.
(That is to say, a feature is only useful for us if it can run reasonably quickly. It doesn’t make sense for us to try to make a special “simplified” version of a rendering feature for, say, the X850 if every X850 is going to turn it off every time for framerate reasons.)
If any of this turns into hardware buying advice, I suppose it would be this:
- If you are deciding between a DX10 and DX9 card (e.g. between the HD2400 and X1900, or GeForce 8600 vs 7900) go for the newer generation DX10 ards (HD or GeForce 8); if the card has decent performance you’ll also be setting yourself up for future features.
- As always, pay attention to the fine print of the model numbers, particularly the configuration. Lower model number cards basically have fewer parallel components than higher number ones and that leads directly to lower framerate.
I see an add online for the GeForce 8500 for $70 and 8600 for $90. But if you look at the links below, you’ll see that the 8500 has only half the shaders of the 8600 – that’s going to be a huge performance difference for $20.
(So the moral of this story is: try to get an HD or GeForce 8 card, but don’t dip into the really low end cards because they’re stripped down too far for X-Plane use.)
These pages (NV, ATI) on Wikipedia list specs for a whole pile of cards and can be useful to decode the fine print.
