Quote:
Originally Posted by ZaiTh
I dont know how many of you played when the game came out but I was on the tech boards quite a bit. Another huge selling point that SOE used was NVidia logo's everywhere blah blah blah. A matter of fact, it did not matter what kind of maker you used...Nvidia/ATi.
As for SM, somoneone quoted SM1.0/1.1 That is correct, they also have SM2.0 to some degree. That was per one of the mods back in late 2004/early 2005. I dont remember to what degree but it was almost negligible. A lot of people were upset that they spent money on $500 Nvidia cards for no good reason.
There was a player by the name of Chris (I forget what company/site he was from) that put a lot of test data out there and he pretty much made Sony put a lid on it because he was able to dispute a lot of what they were saying and they could not disprove him. Was an interesting read and funny at the same time.
I really only think that the only way they are going to seriously increase performance is to re-write the code to utilize GPU's. They did it for EQ1, who knows what will happen.
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Yeah that was chris from over at nvnews, he works for nvidia now.
Your also right about eq2 using sm1.1
Shader model 3.0 isnt just about textures and effects, it can also draw geometry using the GPU, i don't really understand it all, but this can only be a good thing for eq2.
Quote from Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shader
Vertex shaders are run once for each vertex given to the graphics processor. The purpose is to transform each vertex's 3D position in virtual space to the 2D coordinate at which it appears on the screen (as well as a depth value for the
Z-buffer). Vertex shaders can manipulate properties such as position, color, and texture coordinate, but cannot create new vertices. The output of the vertex shader goes to the next stage in the pipeline, which is either a geometry shader if present or the
rasterizer otherwise.
Geometry shaders can add and remove vertices from a mesh. Geometry shaders can be used to generate geometry procedurally or to add volumetric detail to existing meshes that would be too costly to process on the CPU. If geometry shaders are being used, the output is then sent to the rasterizer.
Pixel shaders, also known as fragment shaders, calculate the color of individual pixels. The input to this stage comes from the rasterizer, which fills in the polygons being sent through the graphics pipeline. Pixel shaders are typically used for scene lighting and related effects such as
bump mapping and color toning. (Direct3D uses the term "pixel shader," while OpenGL uses the term "fragment shader." The latter is arguably more correct, as there is not a one-to-one relationship between calls to the pixel shader and pixels on the screen. The most common reason for this is that pixel shaders are often called many times per pixel for every object that is in the corresponding space, even if it is occluded; the Z-buffer sorts this out later.)
Re: New Shader Model 3.0 for eq2 :)
