Video card/driver for best shading support

Hi guys,

I am about to buy a new GPU to satisfy my programming needs, as I will have to implement a fair amount of custom lighting shaders among other things. I would ideally like to use the GLSL of OpenGL 2.0, so my question would be which video card/driver provides the best support for this? More specifically, I can get a good price for a 9800 Pro, I guess the hardware is powerful enough, what about the ATI drivers?

Many thanks

Alex

To my knowledge the latest Nvidia and Ati drivers support opengl 2.0 (ati earlier than nvidia).

PS 2.0 are compatible since the Radeon 9700, and since FX 5700 (not working on 5500). nvidia drivers support opengl 2.0 since ForceWare 77.72 and ATI since Cataylst 5.3

The equivalent of 9800pro is FX5900XT/pro, in France the price is ~140€ for a sapphire 9800pro

I also raccomand Radeon if you need shading only.
It is performance-wise very good and has al the functionalities you need shading-wise.

The thing in which Radeon lacks is HDR blending. In case you need this then you’ll have to spend some money and get GF6600. This is what I did.

The thing in which Radeon lacks is HDR blending[/QB]
What is HDR blending?

i think he means floating point, frame buffer blending…

Originally posted by <anGLes>:
i think he means floating point, frame buffer blending…
Is is related to the new DX Shader 3.0?

I think it’s not, altough I’m not sure.
If I’m not wrong, FX does support SM 3 and it does not support floating point blending… take this with some salt, I’m not really used to DX slang.
Also, it must be said that GF6600GT costs quite a bit more than 9800 here so you probably have the obvious “features for price” problem.

Originally posted by Obli:
I think it’s not, altough I’m not sure.
If I’m not wrong, FX does support SM 3 and it does not support floating point blending… take this with some salt, I’m not really used to DX slang.
Also, it must be said that GF6600GT costs quite a bit more than 9800 here so you probably have the obvious “features for price” problem.

I think your wrong, i think SM 3.0 are a GeForce 6x00 feature, concerning HDR, nv GeForce FX support this, some examples are running on my 5900XT, like the HDR OpenGL project on the nvidia SDK, and a RNL project under DirectX API
( if you want to test it )

Concerning floating point blending…this is either a 6x00 feature as said.
And concerning 6600 price, afaik the 6x00 are expensive, but the embedded technology is newest than 9800pro (i think)

Wait for geforce 7, they seem to provide extra things for shaders. Just have a look at their website for more information.