Old cards and GLSL

[Toni Ylisirniö]

Which old cards support GLSL either in HW or software? Mainly interested in vertex shader support. I know atleast GF4 MX440 supports vexter shaders, but which others do?

[jra101]

All GeForce GPUs support GLSL in software or hardware. GeForce FX or better GPUs will support vertex and fragment shaders in hardware, GeForce3 or better will support vertex shaders in hardware.

For fragment shader emulation on GeForce 4 or older GeForce GPUs you can use NVEmulate (available from developer.nvidia.com).

[Toni Ylisirniö]

Thank you. Do you know anything about Radeons support? This is for a project where we intend to support olders cards too (atleast run on them ), so it would jolly nice if we can do away without any exceptions in the rendering code (ie. that we can use vertex shaders everywhere instead of having to replicate computations in C++).

[Korval]

In theory, Radeons of 8xxx stature or greater should be able to support "limitted" vertex programs (no looping, etc). However, ATi probably isn't too interested in making a glslang compiler for these cards, as it would be one more thing in their drivers that has to be tested and debugged. They might have done it, but if they haven't done so by now, they probably aren't.

You could always have an ARB_vp fallback, as those cards do support ARB_vp.

BTW, do check out this site: http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/index.php. It contains a list of cards and drivers and which extensions each card/driver pair supports.

[jwatte]

ATI 9500 and up support fragment and vertex programs in hardware.

ATI 8500 and up _could_ support vertex programs, and some fragment programs, in hardware, but I don't think the drivers actually do it.

Note that the GeForce 4 MX does not support vertex programs in hardware; it's a GeForce 2 level part (NV17) that got branded GeForce 4 MX for marketing purposes.