Recently ATI introduced their new high-end Radeon 9800 PRO graphics accelerator, boasting unlimited shader program lengths via the use of their ?F-Buffer? technology. Beyond3D contacted a number of developers to find out their thoughts on whether this technology is of any use to them. This is what Epic?s Tim Sweeney had to say:
There is great value in fully solving the multipass problem. It will mean that any conceivable pixel shaders we write in the future will work backwards-compatibly on past hardware capable of full multipass temporaries spill, it will just run slower and require more passes on that hardware. That is a HUGE improvement over the current situation, where shaders we write for DirectX9 hardware simply don't work on DirectX8 hardware, and code we write for DirectX8 shaders won't work on DirectX7 hardware.? The rest of Tims comments, and also comments from Dean Sekulic (Croteam), Dany Lepage (Ubisoft), David Lapointe (Ubisoft), Christian Desautels (Ubisoft) and Dean Calver (Eclipse Studios / ShaderX) can be found in the update to our ATI Radeon 9800 PRO Review!
Developer Comments on ATI's 'F-Buffer' @ Beyond3D
There is great value in fully solving the multipass problem. It will mean that any conceivable pixel shaders we write in the future will work backwards-compatibly on past hardware capable of full multipass temporaries spill, it will just run slower and require more passes on that hardware. That is a HUGE improvement over the current situation, where shaders we write for DirectX9 hardware simply don't work on DirectX8 hardware, and code we write for DirectX8 shaders won't work on DirectX7 hardware.? The rest of Tims comments, and also comments from Dean Sekulic (Croteam), Dany Lepage (Ubisoft), David Lapointe (Ubisoft), Christian Desautels (Ubisoft) and Dean Calver (Eclipse Studios / ShaderX) can be found in the update to our ATI Radeon 9800 PRO Review!
Developer Comments on ATI's 'F-Buffer' @ Beyond3D
