Hi Justin > > As I said depends. If you need special access to get it work. For example > > stencil buffer things and you don't have them it's hard to get arround > > these things. > > > I have rarely, if ever, seen an algorithm that comes from research > papers that states "you must use stencil/whatever buffer to make this
Then you haven't read many hardware-based rendering papers since 1998. For example how about looking up at Heidrich et Al. Sure you can do most of the things also in software but having 50fps or 5fps makes quite a big different. Same goes to Volume Rendering most of the recent mayor papers on interactive Volume Rendering are based on hardware functions (like 3d textures, pixel/vertex shaders). > pretty sure that would still hold true. These people make use of stuff > that is known to work, and they have certain other restrictions like That's true. > not trusting anything. Look how long it took for game developers to move > from writing their own custom software renderers to using hardware > accelarated APIs. Even then it took a massive kick up the butt by John I would say that's a more a factor of no available 3d accelerators in every home. > Carmack to make them move. They simply fear to do anything outside what > they currently know. Yes lots of game developers are very conservative that's true. That's why new tricks take ages to get into a new game. But developing a game takes nowadays a few years (if it should be a good one). > As a good example - how many games are going to be produced using > Geforce2 specific extensions. A card that has been out for almost 2 > years now, so you should be seeing the first crop of games coming out There is already one available since 3 months. It's called AquaNox. And look at most of the new game-engines poping up lately, most of them do. Like CloakNT (Chaser), Unreal2, Unreal Tournament 2, Doom3, GTA3 (I would assume). Alot of them don't care about Geforce2 extension as it's DX8.1 (which supports most of the features when not all of Geforce2 and 3). > themselves. Stencil buffers are a good example - game programmers > generally don't use them because only one or two consumer cards support > them with any decent capabilities. Because the game programmer can't Hmm?? Well I'm not from Nvidia but I would say already Geforce256 supports them if not already TNT2 (Geforce256 came out 1999(?) ). So as I said game developers are mostly 2-3 years behind because of production time that's natural. > guarantee that it will work on every card they could come across, that Sorry If I have to laugh here. But alot of game companies don't care at all if it works on every system (or why are there so many patches for popular games?) > custom images. Hell, game programmers still don't want to write > multi-threaded code! Because Win98 is crappy concerning multithreading. > > broke this domain. And nowadays unfortunately game manufacturing is the > > driving force behind hardware improvements. > > > Yes and no. For the high-end people, it isn't because there are still > stuff that consumer cards can't do. OTOH, as last siggraph showed, a lot Yes of course but who's going to fit their need? SGI? If it weren't so sad I would laugh. EOF, J.D. -- Explore SRT with the help of Java3D (http://wwwvis.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/relativity/minkowski) (http://www.antiflash.net/java3d/relativity (mirror) =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
