Another great article over at Beyond3D.
"Beyond3D : What has been more important up-to now - T&L or Per-Pixel Effects like EMBM, DOT3 and Register Combiners? What about the future, rather super-duper Pixel Shaders or Vertex Shaders? Maybe both?
Croteam : Yes, both! Both of them improves scene quality a great deal. So, I can't really decide. Maybe T&L, just because per-pixel effects are here to simulate some stuff that will be very hard to do with lots of polys. They cannot do the real stuff. T&L on the other hand, is for real - it doesn't simulate, you really have higher poly count and you can do with it whatever you want. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't replace per-pixel effects with a high-power T&L unit, since these features are very complementary.
MadOnion : Hardware T&L has definitely been the most important feature of 2000. It has offloaded the CPU to do other tasks in games and allowed for higher polygon counts, resulting in a better game play experience.
The spot as the 2nd most important features could have been FSAA or Texture Compression. Both of them improve image quality significantly, but neither has so far been used widely. I believe we will see wider acceptance of these features this year. Albeit nice features, EMBM & DOT3 don't even come close to the others.
Vertex and Pixel shaders are going to be the hit of the future. When? I don't know, but I wouldn't hold my breath to see them widely used in games anytime soon.
First we will see apps using vertex shaders, then vertex shaders combined with pixel shaders. Pixel shaders as such won't give much benefit over traditional multi-texturing if they are not combined with the vertex shaders.
The transition to vertex shaders will not be easy. Although Intel and AMD have done good job optimizing vertex shaders, it still means that on every DX7 class 3D accelerator (GF2, Radeon et al) vertex shader content will be transformed and lit with the CPU. Pixel shaders are even more difficult since there are no software fallbacks. If you don't have a DX8 pixel shader compatible hardware (there are none at the shops yet), you can't run any content with pixel shaders.
For game developers, it's also a fairly big content (graphics) development & tech change, moving from fixed function pipeline to pixel shaders (but that's a long story!)."
A good Q&A with Croteam, MadOnion and nVidia, covers many different areas.
"Beyond3D : What has been more important up-to now - T&L or Per-Pixel Effects like EMBM, DOT3 and Register Combiners? What about the future, rather super-duper Pixel Shaders or Vertex Shaders? Maybe both?
Croteam : Yes, both! Both of them improves scene quality a great deal. So, I can't really decide. Maybe T&L, just because per-pixel effects are here to simulate some stuff that will be very hard to do with lots of polys. They cannot do the real stuff. T&L on the other hand, is for real - it doesn't simulate, you really have higher poly count and you can do with it whatever you want. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't replace per-pixel effects with a high-power T&L unit, since these features are very complementary.
MadOnion : Hardware T&L has definitely been the most important feature of 2000. It has offloaded the CPU to do other tasks in games and allowed for higher polygon counts, resulting in a better game play experience.
The spot as the 2nd most important features could have been FSAA or Texture Compression. Both of them improve image quality significantly, but neither has so far been used widely. I believe we will see wider acceptance of these features this year. Albeit nice features, EMBM & DOT3 don't even come close to the others.
Vertex and Pixel shaders are going to be the hit of the future. When? I don't know, but I wouldn't hold my breath to see them widely used in games anytime soon.
First we will see apps using vertex shaders, then vertex shaders combined with pixel shaders. Pixel shaders as such won't give much benefit over traditional multi-texturing if they are not combined with the vertex shaders.
The transition to vertex shaders will not be easy. Although Intel and AMD have done good job optimizing vertex shaders, it still means that on every DX7 class 3D accelerator (GF2, Radeon et al) vertex shader content will be transformed and lit with the CPU. Pixel shaders are even more difficult since there are no software fallbacks. If you don't have a DX8 pixel shader compatible hardware (there are none at the shops yet), you can't run any content with pixel shaders.
For game developers, it's also a fairly big content (graphics) development & tech change, moving from fixed function pipeline to pixel shaders (but that's a long story!)."
A good Q&A with Croteam, MadOnion and nVidia, covers many different areas.