How many people have shader based video cards?

#21 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

#22 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.

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

#24 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.

#25 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.

#26 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.

#27 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

#28 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

#29 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?

#30 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.

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

#32 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.

#33 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.

#34 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.

#35 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

#36

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.

#37 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 :)

#38 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?

#39 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)

#40 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.