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Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by chevalier, Sep 1, 2004.

  1. chevalier

    chevalier Knight of Everfull Chalice ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran

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    Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault from Obsidian Forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

    Brian Lawson, Graphics Programming

    Graphic Cards
    DO NOT DO THIS! I want no card specific enhancements. I hated that bioware screwed ATI users and then blamed it on ATI for so long until they actually had fixed the problem. (I'm talking about shiny water).
    I don't think it will be such an issue this time. One of the pluses to DX9 is that there is a CLEARLY defined specification as to what MUST be supported in order to call a card DX9 compliant. I code according to the specification. If a hardware vendor claims that they support a feature but for some reason it's not working (which from time to time happens with new drivers etc.) then the burden should really be on THEIR shoulders to correct the problem...not mine to go back in and hack around the broken feature to make it work.

    My impression of ATI's and NVidia's implementations of DX9 hardware support is that they're both pretty complete and pretty good.

    Edit: To address the original poster's suggestion... What he's specifically refering to is that since the 6800 supports DX 9.0c which has support for vertex and pixel shaders 3.0, you can render multiple instances of the same piece of geometry quickly without having to resubmit the geometry to the GPU...hence, reducing bandwidth consumption and speeding up the overall process of rendering the same thing mutliple times in a single frame. Take for instance, a forrest full of trees... If the forrest has 100 tress that use the same tree model, then with shader profile 3.0 you can submit the tree geometry once to the GPU and render it 100 times rather than resubmitting the tree 100 times. I think you can see where this is going.

    On a side note, it wouldn't be too difficult to check for those kinds of capabilities and do it the new fast way for cards that support it and do it the older way for cards that don't. But that's for us to deal with...it's what we get paid to do.

    More: There's no doubt that even though it's MY opinion that I shouldn't have to hack around a broken feature...that more often than not, I'll be forced to do it anyway. Of course we want our players to be happy and satisfied.

    I also feel that with DX9 we're LESS likely to encounter some of what is being discussed in this thread regarding how the original water was implemented etc. and the problems that were encountered with such "card specific" implementations.

    I have yet to encounter anything that I can't do with generic DX9 functionality and have it not work on both cards.

    On ATI's and NVidia's behalf though, try to keep in mind that we're not the only ones they serve. There are a TON of other companies out there that are all also in need of their support when issues come up.

    I can remember reading earlier this year on some message board somewhere that some guy was finally able to play a game for the first time in like 6+ months because some of the changes that ATI had made to there drives had originally broke the game and then they finally got around to making changes that fixed the original break. At some point, developers probably have to draw the line. The bottom line is that of course we want the game to run on as many cards as possible while facilitating our efforts to achieve that goal. From time to time though, it's to be expected that somebody's implementation of something somewhere is likely going to break things for a while.

    Still, it's too bad ATI didn't just fully support SM3.0 for their X800 line instead of coming up with their SM2.0b stopgap measure.
    Werd to that. It would have been nice to have cards from both vendors that support SM_3_0. Oh well, soon enough...I guess.

    SM3.0, are u refering to pixel shading?
    SM_3_0 refers specifically to "shader model 3.0" which encapsulates both Vertex and Pixel shader profiles 3.0. It's more associated (genarally) with writing high level shading language effects.

    High level shading.... I like the sound of that....
    Believe me...so do I!! Because it's a hell of a lot nicer being able to code in HLSL rather than the old-skool assembly style shaders.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2018
    chevalier, Sep 1, 2004
    #1
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