How many people have shader based video cards?

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Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:09 GMT)

I guess I should respond to this blog, since I have a few video cards.

Desktop
nVidia 6800 GT (Shader 3.0 / 256 Meg)

Thinkpad
ATI Radeon x300 (Shader 2.0 / 64 Meg)

MacBook Pro
ATI Radeon x1600 (Shader 3.0 / 256 Meg)

Jacopo De Luca   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:15 GMT)   Resource Rating: 3

Maybe you should check this page, where you will find the results of the Valve's Steam hardware survey.
It should give you a pretty good idea of the average PC for a gamer.

Hope this helps.

Bye,
Jacopo

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:20 GMT)

That is a pretty interesting page. So only 10.90% of Half Life 2 players have video cards that do not support shaders.

Ian \"Xest\" Winter   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:25 GMT)

Probably not the best guage Jacopo as the people doing that survey are nearly all people with HL2 which requires a high end shader supporting machine already!

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:28 GMT)

Well the DirectX 7 path does not require shaders. I guess you could say that Half Life 2 is more of a game for hard core gamers, but at the same time it is one of the most popular PC games.

Justin Simms   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:31 GMT)

No, Half-Life 2 will run on a TNT2.

Tom Bampton   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:35 GMT)

In my 3 main dev boxes I have a 6600, 9200SE and a GMA950. I don't think the GMA950 really counts as shader capable, though ;-)

One problem with asking here is we're all game developers. It's not really representative of the general game playing populace.

T.

Matt Vitelli   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:40 GMT)

x2 Nvidia 7800s GT (Shader Model 3.0/ 256 meg)

:)

Aaron E   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:41 GMT)

Laptop - Dell XPS Gen 2
nVidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra (Shader 3.0 / 256 Meg)

Desktop 1 - homebuilt
nVidia GeForce 5200fx (buggy Shader 2.0 / 128 Meg)

Desktop 2 - Micron
nVidia TNT2 (32 Meg)

Jacopo De Luca   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:46 GMT)   Resource Rating: 3

@Ian.
Actually, everyone with Steam installed could partecipate in that survey.
I don't remember the date, but (if I remember correctly) one of the patches for Counter Strike (the old one, not the Source version) required the presence of the Steam Client so I think that the results should be quite accurate for the average gamer (and not only for the HL2 users).
However, it covers only PC users, and not Mac and linux users.

Bye,
Jacopo

Alexander "taualex" Gaevoy   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:51 GMT)

There are a lot casual gamers with GMA900/950 thanx to Dell, HP and others to sell cheap computers with onboard cards...
Tha means alot of them cannot run shaders with good fps, or not to run them at al... Count on that.

Steam is not a good place to base your opinion, because they are not aimed at the casual gamer... Go figure...
Edited on Jun 27, 2006 16:53 GMT

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 16:59 GMT)

Well I honestly don't see Linux or Mac being huge platforms for games. Linux has never been a platform for games, and all of the companies that tried to make games for Linux, have gone out of business. On the other hand with the Mac, there is a small market for games, mostly filled by one publisher (http://www.aspyr.com/). Of course pretty much all of the games on the Mac are ports. Mac also has the huge issue of breaking things every time they upgrade their operating system, so you end up having to do a lot of work, just to sell a few of your games.

I don't really see the situation getting much better in the future. OpenGL has been responding to graphics card innovations very slowly, which is going to set Linux and Mac OS back further and further in the game market every year. At the same time Microsoft is doing things like limiting OpenGL support on Windows (it will only support OpenGL 1.4, using emulation). So I don't even see OpenGL being a viable platform for programming games in a few years.

Well anyways that's my opinion.

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:03 GMT)

Well that's another question. How many people that play casual games, actually play anything but flash games. I know a few people that are the typical casual gamers, but they usually play flash based games exclusively. Are casual games as people typically think of them, an over saturated market? Does it make more sense to go after niche market, that doesn't really have any other offerings (like a cricket game)?

Zachary Zadell   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:08 GMT)

whoops hardware survey already posted
Edited on Jun 27, 2006 17:09 GMT

Jacopo De Luca   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:09 GMT)   Resource Rating: 3

@Alexander
Yes, you are right, but if we are talking about games that could benefit from shaders, then we are probably talking about a different market than the casual game market.

@Ray
I could be wrong, but I think that the Mac market is much more receptive to "indie" games than the PC market. Didn't someone from GG said that more than half of the sales from the GG website come from Mac users?

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:15 GMT)

From what I remember that was posted many years ago. The Mac market was a bit different a few years ago, because Apple was in a lot of trouble software wise. When they migrated to Mac OS X they had no games, and no software in general. That was a great time to get games on the Mac, because you were the only game in town (pun intended of course). At this point you can get a wide selection of ported commercial games, which makes it less likely that your game will be selected, instead of lets say the Sims 2, WoW or Doom 3.

I am not necessarily correct, but that is my understanding of the situation.

Nicolas Quijano   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:23 GMT)

Ray, what do you mean by supporting shaders ? it's a bit vague, as Intel has vidchips that only support the pixel/fragment part of things in hw, and do T&L purely in software...
A GeForce 2 has shader support (first gpu to do so), but it's quite limited compared to present offerings, etc.
Do you mean hw support for both vertex and fragment/pixels ? A specific revision of the shader model standard ?
'Cause if you're going to code for multiple SMs, might as well add support for a generic fixed function pipeline...
That said, I would say the vast majority of personal computers sold in the last few years have some form of hw shader support, but that doesn't mean the users have decent drivers installed, etc.
Just a few quick thoughts :)

Surge   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:25 GMT)

Mines ATI Shade 1.2-3.0 I bought it about a year ago to see the TSE demo, dont remember the model number right now.

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:35 GMT)

@Nicolas: Programming for multiple shader models is much easier than supporting fixed function shaders. Even if you support cards all the way down to Shader 1.1, you will know that you are getting a certain set of functionality if you are using DirectX 9. Essentially you can just query the card for its shader version (1.1, 2.0, 3.0) and very easily tailor the effects for each shader model. If you use include files in your HLSL programs, there will be very little replicated code anyways.

If you are supporting the fixed function pipeline, most effects require weird tricks to replicate or emulate them on the fixed function hardware. Most of those tricks include going into the C++ code and creating them by hand, not going into some text files and modifying the shader code. Granted some shader based effects require modifying C++ code, but its usually to a lesser extent, and the code is typically a lot cleaner and more reusable.

Phil Carlisle   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:51 GMT)

Ray: I think you underestimate the Mac as a target platform for indie games.

I dont have any hard and fast figures to back this up, but every single sales chart I've seen that has indie games on mac and win, they come out either even, or ahead slightly on the mac.

I dont think the mac market has changed all that much to be honest. There were always mac porting houses doing AAA ports to mac. But your mac gamer is probably a bit more "indie" friendly than typical PC enthusiasts and have taken to games outside the norm a bit more maybe.

Fundamentally I'm still supporting the MAC as a platform as its something I think as indies we need.

Having said that, horses for courses, depends on your game. Air Ace will get a Mac version at some point, because it needs the exposure we can get from doing it. But thats going to need some help from GG to get the Mac TSE up and running.

John McArthur   (Jun 27, 2006 at 17:57 GMT)

I'll chime in here. 2 computers:

#1) geforce 2 - non-shader: @nicholas - my gf2 does NOT support any shaders, and any game that requires at least shaders 1.0 rejects my card, so dont know where your getting your info from.

#2) dell demension 300? - integrated intel extreme: non-shader. I HATE this damn business computer I bought for $400. I assumed there was at least a agp port. Nothing. Integrated chip and thats it. dell bastards BASTARDS! sorry, just thinking about it makes me angry.

I would say that for about 1+ years I have been locked out of playing the newer game demos out there because of a lack of shader support. On a good note, I am forced to look at casual games and am beginning to really enjoy them for what they are, as a gamer and a developer.

John

Ben Garney   (Jun 27, 2006 at 18:04 GMT)

The GF2 can run vertex shaders, but not pixel shaders.

If you want to completely hit the casual market you need to support DX8.1 w/o pixel shaders, and run on parts as low as intel 810 chips (and similar). Intel is the largest video card manufacturer.

If you're targeting any sort of hardcore game, then the Valve survey is reasonably accurate. Consider how well HL1 and 2 are selling - it's a hardcore cross-section, but it's a big one.

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 18:11 GMT)

So Intel is holding back computer technology? Who would have ever thought that would happen!? ;)

Bryan Stroebel   (Jun 27, 2006 at 18:56 GMT)

I think it's time to move games completly to shader supported cards. You can buy a card that supports shaders for almost nothing. There's really no excuse not to have one.
Edited on Jun 27, 2006 18:57 GMT

Trenton Shaffer   (Jun 27, 2006 at 19:05 GMT)

I bought a BFG Tech 7800 GTX OC back in August of 2005 for $519.99, which at the time was the top of the line card. It took until May of 2006 for the thing to drop in price, it now goes for around $350. Smokin' card, obviously not top of the line anymore, especially since the release of the 7950 GX2 1GB and the 7900's. You can get a GeForce 6800 GT (or higher) for a decent price now, so I see no reason not to have a video card that doesn't support Shader 3.0 anymore. Shader 2 just doesn't have the instruction capacity that Shader 3 has, so why not spend the extra $50-$100 to get the latest shader model?

I've owned many cards, GeForce 5200, 5700LE, 5900, 6200, 6600 and the current 7800 GTX OC. Personally I am just going to purchase another 7800 GTX OC and run it in SLI mode, I already have the ASUS SLI Deluxe Motherboard to handle it.

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 19:09 GMT)

Well not all people need an insane card. Shader 2.0 works pretty well for a lot of effects. Of course shader 3.0 is a bit nicer, you can still do normal mapping a few other effects using Shader 1.1.

Michael Hense   (Jun 27, 2006 at 20:20 GMT)

yup... that's where i'm at... GeForce 5200 (uugghh), GeForce 6100 (better)... and Radeon 920 (ps/vs 1.4)

so i can see some stuff... some of the time... :)

--Mike

Alex Scarborough   (Jun 27, 2006 at 20:28 GMT)

I'm going to toss in my two cents here because, for better or worse, OpenGL will have to be taken into account until Microsoft owns the *entire* world and not just 90-95% of it.

Forget OpenGL shaders on anything below a Radeon 9500 or GeForce FX 5200, unless you are very dedicated and quite insane. There is no common shading language for anything below those cards, so to use something along the lines of D3D SM 1.1-1.4 shaders, you would have to write 3 different shaders for every one shader you would write normally, two of which are in vendor specific ASM languages. Nice. Just to make things more pleasant, each shading language has a different method of submitting data from the application to the shader. In the end, you would have three distinct pipelines for shader rendering, which would just be ugly.

That isn't just for pixel shaders, incidentally. nVidia has been nice, and you can use GLSL vertex shaders on a GeForce 2. ATi and Intel on the other hand... not happening. GLSL vertex shaders carry the same requirements as GLSL fragment shaders on ATi and Intel cards. The old ASM vertex shaders actually will run on lower end cards, down to the Radeon 8500 and Intel 830 chipsets, but then we're back to ASM. Thankfully the ARB actually did something right, so application side the same functions are used to submit data to ASM and GLSL vertex shaders, so you don't have to use a different pipeline for those. And yes, there is substantial use for vertex shaders without fragment shaders. This is one example of what can be done in GL using vertex shaders. Not half bad.

Anyhow, enough GL stuff.

Cards I have:
Radeon 9600
Radeon X600XT
Intel 845M

Ray Noolness Gebhardt   (Jun 27, 2006 at 21:06 GMT)

I would be willing to screw 10% of the world if it made my product better, and it saved my a lot of time making it. Well not really screw, that 10% is just not part of your target market, in that case. So in theory if you could get 10% more sales by supporting a certain technology, but it would increase overall development time by lets say 30%, then is it worth it?
Edited on Jun 27, 2006 22:19 GMT

Adrian Wright   (Jun 27, 2006 at 21:14 GMT)

you know if you looks at those total stats you find some interesting info:

1) 96% of user play at 1024 X 768 or above
2) 96% of users are running windows 2000 or above
3) 91% of users have DVD capatible drive

dunno why but i find those stats also interesting. with that said I have 2 machines both with at least shader 2.0 support.

Vashner   (Jun 28, 2006 at 02:08 GMT)

HUH? No killer apps for shaders?
SWG, EQ2, BF 2, Farcry, etc etc... XBOX 360... *.*... ??

Adrian Tysoe   (Jun 28, 2006 at 02:08 GMT)

you just have to decide what your target audience is. If your making a casual game then you need to make sure that you have fallbacks to support older non shader hardware or you will be losing a huige portion of middle aged non tech savie people that wouldn't have a clue how to download drivers and install them and make sure that the latest DX is installed.

If your making a gamers game, then your going to attract experienced gamers who will mostly have cards with shaders on.

Our engine has automatic fallback materials per model, so as long as you create the technique for each hardware type, you have little to worry about.

Tim Tillotson   (Jun 28, 2006 at 02:20 GMT)

I have 3 computers, 2 with pixel shaders, 1 without. Overall I think graphics are always going to be second to gameplay. Ill buy last years Game of the Year over cool graphics any day.

Thomas Rafferty   (Jun 28, 2006 at 02:58 GMT)

Radeon 9200 (Pixel/Fragment Shader 1.4, Vertex Shader 1.1)
I've been able to create a colourisation filter for T2D/TGB, which provides more functionality than the standard blend modes. I can do greyscale and map greyscale values to gradients including alpha values. If I make a game that uses shaders, I will try to support the early ATI/nVidia shader cards, as they can still pull off a lot of neat effects for 2d games.

Hans   (Jun 28, 2006 at 04:35 GMT)

yep i sure do

Geforce 7900GTX 512 MB Ram Shader v3

man when u are running this 1280*1024 with everything upto the max on HalfLife 2 u never look back

Mincetro   (Jun 28, 2006 at 09:23 GMT)

Quote:

---

so why not spend the extra $50-$100 to get the latest shader model?

---

Because not everybody has the extra 450-$100 USD for another buzzword :P

I have a Sapphire 9600XT and my brothers both have ASUS 6200's.

Andrew Nicholson   (Jun 28, 2006 at 10:28 GMT)

Im still running a Ge-Force 2 card so I struggle with shader based games. Never really thought about shader only games, I know they have the ooh, aah and wow factors but does it really matter? Id take gameplay over visuals any day, but thats just me.

Cheapskate Indie :)

Pat Hartl   (Jun 28, 2006 at 20:05 GMT)

I am running a GeForce 4 Ti4200 and a ATI All in Wonder VE, Sso I do not have the little devil pixel shaders. But I can run Hal Lie 2 on high graphics with 60+ FPS. Does anyone know if GeForce FX's have pixel shaders?

Pisal Setthawong   (Jun 29, 2006 at 09:48 GMT)

Here is my specs:

Production Computer:
GeForce 6600GT (pretty much up to date)

Older Computer:
GeForce2 MX (can't do anything)

Notebook:
Intel Extreme Graphics (pretty much obselete)

Adrian Tysoe   (Jun 29, 2006 at 14:39 GMT)

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/reviews.html

Here's a number of in depth blu ray film reviews from hiugh definition digest:

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/reviews.html

The best example they had of blue ray was Underworld evolution. Most blueray videos have none or very few extras, usualy fewer than the regular DVD. Which seems strange when there is so much more space avaliable.


'Underworld: Evolution' offers a good example of what Blu-ray is capable of. Though the transfer isn't absolutely perfect, it does look more consistently pleasing than any other Blu-ray title I've reviewed so far. The soundtrack is also very good, and all the extras from the standard DVD release seem to have been ported over. If you have to choose between the standard DVD release and this Blu-ray version, I could unequivocally recommend you go with the Blu.

Gabor Forrai   (Jul 08, 2006 at 16:46 GMT)

desktop1: ati 9550 ultra
desktop2:x600 pro
desktop3:nvidia 4200ti
laptop: nvidia 5600go

Jukka Kokkonen   (Jul 19, 2006 at 00:01 GMT)

I'd say that: yes, it is possible to make a shader only game these days. There are a lot of retail games already that require vertex and pixel shaders. However, does this mean that you could create a commercially successful casual game, which requires something like pixel shaders... I don't know... It's a different market.

If you look at several successful casual games (like popcap's puzzle games), a lot of them actually even have some kind of software rendering support. I don't know exactly why... maybe a lot of casual players have some really crappy computers, that may even require software rendering to be able to run correctly...

And if you look at several less-casual games, such as Battlefield 2, it actually requires a pretty high level pixel shaders. Even GF4Ti cards, which do have pixel shaders, are not supported by BF2 as it requires better ps version. Then again, a lot of BF2 players probably are hardcore gamers, not casual gamers.

So, it all depends... Which is your market. Casual or hardcore gamers... Or something in between. (Personally, I wouldn't go make a clearly casual game that requires pixel shaders on the PC market at this very moment, maybe a year or two later. But this is just my view.)

My compu specs / other computers I've occasionally used lately (roughly in order of use frequency):
windows, X800XL
windows, 6600GT
linux, voodoo banshee
windows, FX5700U
windows, FX5200
windows laptop, some (useless) intel integrated. :P
windows, GF4Ti

(other cards I happen to have unused include R9000 and ati rage 3D)

John_lab   (Apr 15, 2007 at 03:08 GMT)

i have a geforce 6600le 256 mb on one pc and intel in laptop

Wang Guojing   (Sep 20, 2007 at 04:27 GMT)

first, your topic is very interesting and valuable,

i have bought series cards which support at least 1.1 version of shader. one is GeforceTi500 which bought 4 years ago, others are Geforce5200 and Geforce7300GT, oh, suddenly i found that i m a fan of nVidia, aha.

then, i v a question,

dose the application powered by TGEA have to run at the shader-supporting cards?

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