Hardware noise() support - any news?

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.

I believe it’ll need more artist tools before noise gets really requested to be in hardware. Last time I posted something on this, no one really cared about noise.
As soon as the bandwith/performance gap gets tragic, someone will surely have to put it in silicon and start saving.

Personally I find using a texture for noise much more useful, with mipmapping and everything.

Personally I find using a texture for noise much more useful, with mipmapping and everything.
Textures can certainly get some jobs done well, but animated and/or 3D noise becomes difficult to do, 4D noise is impossible and there will be directional artefacts in a stored image noise texture that is magnified. There are many good reasons why procedural noise is used so extensively in offline rendering.

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