Originally posted by: chizow
Because pixel shader 1.4 is rarely used in any game to date, and few games plan to use it. Its a synthetic benchmark in every sense of the word. Not to mention that early tests have shown the FX is actually faster even though it requires multiple passes (look at Carmack's Doom3 comments) to render the same scene.
Chiz
Because pixel shader 1.4 is rarely used in any game to date, and few games plan to use it.
Doom 3 does not count as a future game I presume?
I also presume that Tiger Wood 2003 does not count as a present game? (It's interesting that nVidia claims Tiger Woods uses PS 1.1, whereas the devloeprs claim PS 1.1 is only a fallback for non PS 1.4 capable hardware)
Their 2 quick examples of prominent games.
While I'm hardly a fan of 3DMark, the usage of PS 1.4 I do support.
I agree that it's seldom used in currently available games, but 3DMark 2003 isnt intended to simulate current games, it's intended to simulate future games.
In the future I expect PS 1.4 to play a significant role, as it's more flexible then PS 1.1 without the extra overhead and the requirement of FP paths of PS 2.0 which should ensure that it many cases PS 1.4 code will be much faster then PS 2.0 can be.
Virtually all upcoming GPU's should support PS 1.4, leaving only the GF3/4 as shader capable GPU's without PS 1.4 support.
PS 2.0 hardware would be better off rendering to PS 1.4 over PS 1.1 due to the flexibility, and when the capabilities of PS 2.0 are not needed it'd be faster to go to PS 1.4 so as to utilize less overhead and add the ability to use the integer pipes rather then the slower/more flexible FP pipes requires for PS 2.0 as long as the extra precicion in the FP pipes arent required which shouldnt be the case in many situations.
It's noteable that Doom3, which is probably the biggest upcoming game utilizes PS 1.4 heavily for the ARB2 and R200 paths... given that the ARB2 path will likely be the default for most renderers, and the Doom3 engine will almost assuredly see usage in many games I think that adds credence to the idea that PS 1.4 will indeed be used in future games.
I certainly can't imagine that everyone using the Doom3 engine is going to force the hardware to do lighting in multiple passes when any PS 1.4 compliant GPU should be capable of doing so in a single pass in most cases. Not to mention Doom3 based games will likely utilize shadow creation heavily which is rather hard to do effectively without PS 1.4
Personally, my largest issue with their shader code is why their not using PS 1.3 as a fallback instead of PS 1.1
Another issue is the fact that their forcing all shading to be done on the GPU even in cases in which it would be more effective to leave the CPU to handle it. In GT2 & GT3 their forcing the GPU to do the same shader ops over and over for every character rather then duplicating the results over from 1 to another.... in so doing their creating a benchmark that is VERY graphcis card limited... which is arguably a good thing. But their also doing ensuring that the rendering is not representative of real world games that are naturally going to use the most efficient means available to them not that which pushes the GPU the hardest.
Yet anpther problem is that GT1 is primarily single textured. I think if you took all the hundreds of games released in the past year and those games due to be released in the future, the games with single-texturing you could count on one hand.
I have other issues with 3DMark, but most of the others are nothing new and existed in 3DMark2001 as well.
The fact that their much hyped 'Nature' tests bare not even the faintest resemblance to any scenes frequesntly used in games is not the least of those.
Noteably, the frame based rendering, ability to pick any frame from any test and do visual comparisons, and the filtering comparison tools are VERY good components of 3DMark03 however.