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News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 8)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 07/09/2004 | 04:52 PM ]

NVIDIA Shows Off the GeForce 6800 Advantage: Shader Model 3.0 Exposed

NVIDIA and Crytek recently released the FarCry 1.2 patch to media in order to showcase end-users the advantages the Shader Model 3.0 brings in terms of speed. While custom-made demos in the game did not reveal huge performance benefits, specially-created demos to reflect Shader Model 3.0 (SM 3.0) advantages showcased tangible performance boosts because of geometry instancing and use of pixel shader 3.0 for complex per-pixel lighting.

Despite of ATI’s pretty negative attitude towards SM 3.0 these days, pixel and vertex shaders 3.0 are here and begin to ramp up; they, in spite of some negative predictions, bring performance advantage in current games and are likely to boost speed in future titles.

Unfortunately for both NVIDIA and ATI, the majority of games coming out these days hardly use Shader Model 2.0 seriously, not talking about anything more advanced. However, there are a number of titles that can change the world of gaming and take advantage of the Shader Model 3.0 that is supported now only by NVIDIA. Nevertheless, it looks like we are going to see hardware supporting Shader Model 3.0 from ATI Technologies pretty soon, as Shader Model 4.0 is still too far away and game developers along with marketing teams want to have something to jump on.

Graphics experts consider Shader Model 3.0 as a more advanced superset of the Shader Model 2.0 with more sophisticated approach for programming, which may encourage game-developers to create higher-quality titles in terms of graphics. It should be mentioned that basically all SM 3.0 effects can be made using SM 2.0 and are likely to be made using 2.0 because of broader compatibility. Though, because of performance advantage game-developers are projected to use SM 3.0 for supporting hardware in order to allow their games to perform better. Moreover, eventually those, who have SM 3.0-supporting hardware may see some image quality benefits too.

Back in 2001 NVIDIA downplayed the importance of Pixel Shaders 1.4 developed by ATI saying that game-developers would jump on shaders 1.1 and yet-to-be-release 2.0. In early 2003 NVIDIA encouraged game-developers to use 1.4 instead of 1.1 and 2.0 because of dramatic speed-advantage. What did not bring a boost for the RADEON 8500 brought an advantage for the GeForce FX that came out 1.5 years later.

All in all, Shader Model 3.0 is definitely a feature for considerations now, even though its broad use seems to be 6-12 months away…