TSE - Shader 3.0

#1 Ah, i see Brian wrote this in another post..

Quote:The user could set the level of shaders that the TSE will run, so you could set the level of shaders to ps 3.0, 2.0, or 1.0, or fall back completely to fixed function. Right now it detects what level of hardware you support and runs at the maximum level, but it would be easy to change the code to force it lower.

#2 Good eyes.

#3 Ya, 3.0 has some interesting stuff in it like real working flow control on the hardware and texture reads in the vertex buffer. We don't have any automatic features that take advantage of 3.0 yet because it's somewhat exotic. Our CustomMaterial system supports it right off the bat though, so you can immediately start writing your own 3.0 shaders, no extra work there.

#4 Is ATI even going to support 3.0 ? There has been some ramblings about this in at least one thread on the private nvidia dev forums, as well as gamedev.net and opengl.org if memory serves me at all ;)

#5 That the rumor. ATI hasn't announced their 4xx line of hardware yet, so I don't think it's quite official. However, ATI doesn't seem to be doing much to stifle the rumor, so there's a good chance it could be true. Which is a bummer. Just makes my job harder ;)

#6 Worth noting that you can have split shader models (VS 3 but only PS 2.x). Which gives you IMO the really important addition to shader model 3 vertex texturing, dynamic branching in pixel shader is o.k. for reducing shader complexity but not as handy as vertex texturing.

As for ATI making your life harder, thats IHV's for you :-)

#7 As I understand TSE will be able to work with fixed function shaders (as fallback), so I have few questions about it:
1) Are those fixed function shaders Q3-like shaders?
2) What is minimum video hardware these shaders can support?
3) Is there any software I can create/edit fixed function shaders (I know I can write them in notepad, but prefer some kind of editor)

Tnx!

#8 We currently support a GeForce 3 or better in the EA1 demo. We'll have more information about this when we launch EA1 (ie, we should have a roadmap up at that time).

Obviously, what your game will support depends on how willing you are to write fallbacks. :) A lot of features can be done in fixed function, but not in a very generic way (ie, you have to set up your art and rendering pipeline for it in very special ways). TSE will definitely be capable of scaling down to FF, but with the timeline we're on we may not be putting a lot of effort into out-of-box support for non-PS1.1 capable cards.

If you look a year or two out (about the time a game written using TSE would be going out), it doesn't seem like a lot of graphics cards are going to be out there buying games and not capable of at least PS1.1.

Anyway, we'll have definite word out when we do EA1, which is, really, Real Soon Now. :)

#9 Ben, will I be able to type into a box and TSE will make it happen? Something like, "I want a game set in bars where I'm a photographer for Girls Gone Graphical and the better the nekkie pictures the better the scores"... and it makes it?

That would rock, man. Can't wait for TSE. ;)

#10 Lol..erm

nuff said on that one eric :p