| cyrus5 |
  Posted 9th Dec 2006 11:55am |
[CP] Director
L4Y Member
Post 235 / 241
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I agree, I would love to see more variation in AI, it certainly makes the difference in games. Its the difference between 20 soldiers popping out from behind the same crate, to you getting shot in the head by the one that just navigated its way round and outflanked you.
As for textures, procedural textures were used years ago because machines didnt have enough space to store textures, and they were rendering in software anyway, then we moved towards having shed loads of textures, but fixed functionality hw, now we are moving towards a fully general processor purely for graphics and we now have more memory and data than we know what to do with, the speed ups we will see will be coming from the new unified shader systems, these allow very fast generation of procedural textures, AND procedural geometry.
Shader engines were in 2 sections, fragment shaders, for pixel operations, and vertex shaders for vertex manipulation. These units were only ever able to process what you give it, one vertex in, one vertex out. Now shader engines are unified, you can push into it any or no memory you want and the vertices can be generated on the fly.
This removes the vertex transfer bandwidth, you can simply push a shader program a single texture, nothing else, and it can create a terrain height map for you with 1000's of vertices.
Its going to open up the door for some serious quality increases in rendering. Perfect texturing quality, and geometry counts potentially a magnitude higher than what we can do now. 
My company (PowerVR) have this in our newest 3d core PowerVR SGX, we have clients putting this in mobile phones, PDAs, Car Navigation, Car HUD, Set Top boxes and TV's as we speak... We were going to release a desktop version ourselves with this shader technology in 2004, but we decided that we couldn't afford the support required for the desktop market. A shame really. Its possible that some of our partner companies will release a version to the desktop market, but it wont be a high powered monster. Though it is a scaleable design, you can give it as many pipelines as you have silicon...
Until then I shall just dream..  |
