- a Book
My copy of ShaderX arrived. Appears to be an advert for ATI! Virtually every demo requires a ATI Radion to run The demo CD is not good - most have the demo folders have a small text file which says “see ATI demo xxx for an example of this effect” ho hum
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A Link
http://www.accessviolation.cjb.net/
Check out the shader compiler! -
Cg
There have been a few comments on various threads pointing out that moving to a HL shader language is like the move from assembler to C/C++ etc. However, at the moment the hardware available on the GPU side is so limited that most developers should be wary of relying on Cg or any other HLSL to produce optimal code. Even if a HLSL is used in the art path (as a Modeler plugin) I can see developers taking the compiled output and hand-tuning it anyway.
It’s going to be a few years before shader hardware is ‘expendable’ enough, and profiler optimisation good enough, to allow the use of HLSL in performance critical situations (games!).
Having said that, with Cg, Nvidia are addressing a key problem - getting all the great effects the hardware enables into games! The only way to do that is is by putting the code into the art tools and Cg allows that.