Does anyone have any information (which can be shared) concerning when the GLSL noise() functions will start returning something else than zero with anything else than 3DLabs cards?
Isn’t this a long awaited feature? What is the problem? Patent issues? (I know Ken Perlin has a patent pending on one specific hardware implementation of Perlin noise.) Or is there simply a lack of demand? Software shaders for RenderMan use noise() calls all over the place, so I would expect it to be just as useful for hardware shaders.
Imagine what we could do if a noise() call would be just as quick as a texture fetch. It can be done, there’s no doubt about that. It is actually quite a lot simpler than a texture fetch, as there are no memory reads or cache issues involved.