nVidia specific.

[gaby]

Hello,

My goal is to develop an engine that include all the most advanced "non gadget" feature in a engine, to provide very high quality rendering on fixed workstation for our customer (PIII 1ghz + GTS Ultra...). My OGL first version is good : it include TnL trough opengl, and multi-pass texturing. But when y see the feature that include D3D8, I asked me the question "is OpenGL the best API for my target ?".
nVidia doesn't provide advanced "shader" like the D3D ones. So, I have to do all this features trough extentions, but it's an hard work (mathematics is not my cup of thea...). Y really love the OGL API, but no nVidia advanced shading toolbox is available (Dot product lighting, bump, per pixel shading...).

What do you think of my question ?

To understand what y'm waiting from an OGL nvidia shading toolbox, read my message in "Future OpenGL suggestion" forum.

Thanks to share your experience with me.

Gabriel RABHI / Z-OXYDE / France

[mcraighead]

Actually, OpenGL provides all the features D3D does and more, and this will continue for the forseeable future.

Most of the "new features" in DX8 are still not supported by any hardware yet. Many of those that are already have OpenGL extensions shipping. For example, pixel shaders are really a subset of NV_register_combiners.

When our full DX8 hardware is released, we will have _all_ of the new features, including several not exposed in D3D, exposed in OpenGL.

- Matt

[mandroka]

I think the point here is that d3d supports (will support) these features using one method. Using GL deleopers have to create their vendor specific code to the NV_... extensions.

In this case all I want to know is that
Will there be a more general solution for GL? I mean e.g. EXT_register-combiners ... or something like that...

[gaby]

OK. I have to continue with opengl, and learning the NV extensions. I have to find ogl examples to understand how all this work too.

My goal is to obtain a generic, full scene, multi-light bump mapping. I have no idea of what kind of perf I should reach compared to my simple textured engine (I'm working on SGI, at this time).

Thanks.

[Sven Clauw]

Actually, there is a NVidia tool for Ogl pixel-shaders: NVshaderaid.
don't have a link right now, check there dev-pages.