Comments on: New Toys

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:47:29 +0000

Roughly speaking, DX10 class hardware should do the 3.3 stuff (dual blending, instancing) and DX11 hardware should do tessellation. That would mean:

3.3: NV GeForce 8, 100,200,300 series
ATI Radeon HDs 2000-4000

4.0: NV 400 series (coming soon?) and ATI Radeon HD5000.

Two bits of fine print:
- Some Radeon HDs have tessellation hw already - ATI's way ahead on that. But I don't know if the tessellation hw is good enough to meet the Dx11/GL4 spec. So we'll see if we see the tessellation extension in the HD4000 series, for example. (This is a case where OGL is nice because if hardware does have one-off interesting features it can advertise one extension, even if it isn't full OGL 4 hw.)
- It is my understanding that the GF8800 does _not_ have the right hardware to truly optimally do instanced arrays, so the driver "fakes" this extension. This is moderately surprising to me given that this hardware can do some other extensions that strike me as equivalent difficulty. TBD how this shakes out.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:28:01 +0000

One question that I have after reading that exciting post, Ben, is this: How current does one's video card have to be in order to take advantage of OGL 3.3 and 4.0? Is it merely a cool driver update, or is it time to start saving again (after having dropped $400 on a brandy new GTX card a few months ago!! 😉 )

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:54:16 +0000

Yay! I was starting to become a little concerned that we would not have a path toward tessellation or instancing. That's very exciting news.
I'd like to cast my vote toward some procedurally based low level terrain. Having instanced grass, rocks, etc, along with tessellated terrain will finally provide crucial low-level detail for more precise and enjoyable helicopter flying.

Great posts, I always enjoy them. Keep up the awesome, and dedicated work.