Turns out that the vertex shaders in the Radeon X1000 series GPUs don't support a notable Shader Model 3.0 feature: vertex texture fetch. This question came up in the late stages of writing my Radeon X1000 series review, and I just got confirmation from ATI yesterday. Radeon X1000 series lacks vertex texture fetchīy Scott Wasson - 12:06 pm, October 6, 2005 The point here is that ATI has claimed to do Shader Model 3.0 "right," and from what we have seen today, maybe it isn't so "right" at all.
This may not be such a big deal if this particular 3D feature is never exploited until the next generation of video cards. Isn’t the point of standards and Shader Model 3.0 to allow game content developers and programmers a standard API among graphics cards to make their job a little easier? However this does put more work on the shoulders of the game content developer instead of exploiting an easy Shader Model 3.0 feature in their code. It does appear that a workaround is possible. So where does that leave ATI? Have they really done Shader Model 3.0 right or not? How can you claim to do Shader Model 3.0 right and then leave out a feature of the specification? The GeForce 6 and 7 series from NVIDIA supports this feature. However, the case here is that ATI is claiming they have done Shader Model 3.0 "right," yet they are missing an official Shader Model 3.0 feature. Now, this 3D effect itself may not be currently used in current games, and in fact may not even be used until the next generation of DX10 video cards. There are certain 3D effects which can benefit from this ability such as true dynamic displacement mapping. However, with some recent news that has come to light we wonder if this slogan is really correct.Īccording to The Tech Report, the Radeon X1000 series lack a Vertex Shader 3.0 feature called "Vertex Texture Fetching." Vertex Texture Fetching is useful when you need a vertex shader to read from texture memory.
(Which we still have not seen for sale without delayed delivery.) ATI proclaims that they have done Shader Model 3.0 "right" by improving dynamic branching performance and turning batches of pixels into threads. ATI has been selling the "Shader Model 3.0 Done Right" slogan along with the launch of their Radeon X1000 line of video cards.
0 kommentar(er)
