On Wednesday 27 July 2005 03:18 pm, Roland Scheidegger wrote:
> Patrick McFarland wrote:
> > Heh, the only thing I want is GL ARB fragment shaders accelerated as much
> > as possible by R200 hardware. I don't see that happening with ATI's
> > binary drivers, they only support the old ATI pre-ARB fragment shader
> > interface.
>
> I'm not sure if it would be useful to even try something like that. Not
> only would you violate the spec (hardware doesn't support required
> precision/range of values), but if you'd try to compile a shader you'd
> likely figure out it won't fit into these 8 instruction slots anyway (ok
> if we'd figure out how to pass the values from stage 1 to stage 2 we
> would get 16 slots, and we could do even 1 level of dependant texture
> reads). But there are probably a ton of things you couldn't directly fit
> to the hardware and you'd need to expand to multiple instructions.

Even if we violate precision/range stuff, being able to accelerate simplistic 
shaders would be quite useful. Its better than not having a software 
implementation of the shader pipeline.

Also, what stops you from splitting up a shader, and running the peices back 
to back over multiple passes? Can't you emulate longer shaders doing that?

-- 
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd 
all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to
repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989

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