We would've used DX10 if it had been implemented as our principal engine developer invented HLSL when he previously worked at Microsoft. Instead, because DX9 was so buggy and slow, he had to implement our realtime shaders in OpenGL because it was the only thing that was functional in Softimage. However it doesn't match our game 'look' 100% as our game engine uses some DirectX extensions that aren't available in OpenGL. Our programmers don't want to touch shaders in Softimage anymore because they're tired of having to rewrite all the HLSL shaders from the game into OpenGL code each time there's an update.
While integrating DX11 would be great, the main problem performance-wise is the number of queries Softimage performs to determine if a viewport needs to be updated. We ran XSI through G-debug while troubleshooting our shaders one day a while back and discovered roughly 20% of the time was spent querying views to determine if something needed to be updated. I'm told most game engines spend less than 1% doing that task. Matt -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2012 1:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Is the next Softimage also getting that DirectX 11 threatment? There is an audience that needs DirectX 11 authoring in the app, this isn't a either/or proposal. These guys don't need at all Mental Ray, Arnold, or Renderman authoring. In Softimage, we dropped DX10 at one point during a RTS viewport re-write, given the amount of work required and the lack of interest. (Only the team that did Lost Planet used it, I think?) DX is not a "make pretty" switch, it's a graphic API, very different from DX9, that you can then use to implement a renderer and specify your own shaders which you must somehow author. The API itself does almost nothing, but it does specify a high minimal hardware requirement for shader features support and of course ability to write much more complex shaders. On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Stefan Andersson <[email protected]> wrote: > I would also say that it affects a lot of us working with commercials > also (most that I know of uses Linux and not Windows). > > On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 8:26 PM, Serguei Kalentchouk > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hmm DirectX... does this mean no Linux (or Mac) support then? >> So this feature would be pretty much useless for the majority of Maya >> users working in film? >> >> Looks pretty through!
