TSE Artifacts

#21 Ben, what settings are you running at to see those frames? Also which pixel shader version? Just curious because I see about 100 FPS here and there in the demo with my 5900 Ultra 256MB.

Thanks.

#22 There should be no artifacts with holes in terrain, purple backgrounds, or flickering. Can any of you confirm that you are still having problems if you A) Have latest drivers, B) Have antialiasing turned to "App Controlled" in your dirver settings and C) Did not force textures to high detail?

There will be a new demo out this morning that will check these things (except the antialiasing, nothing we can do about that). Stay tuned.

#23 It was Robert Blanchet's system. I'm sure he can give you exact settings, but I recall the system to be about 2.1GHz and running the specified GF4Ti.

Incidentally, we've released a new demo build that does driver version checking and better checking about card capabilities/error handling. We fixed a glow buffer issue. The download should also be a bit smaller. Go check it out!

#24 @Brian/Ben
- You going to be checking driver versions ? Great!

Another thing you/the community might want to do is detect the maximum shader supported (and have a list of cards known to have problems with newer shaders and force the "max" shader value to something sensible?) and have a setting a drop-down box in "options" ?

#25 The TSE already detects what level of shader support your card has and generates shaders accordingly. That's why those of you with pixel shader 1.x cards are not seeing per-pixel specular - the card can't do it, so TSE drops that feature.

There's been talk of the "forcing" option in the prefs to force the TSE to use a lower shader level than the card's maximum. This was meant for debugging and testing lower version shaders when running on high end cards.
It does have the side effect of speeding up performance on low end Geforce FX cards ( < 5800) because nVIDIA's pixel pipeline runs much faster on 1.x shaders for the FX line. So it may be implemented as a user option.

#26 "Incidentally, we've released a new demo build that does driver version checking and better checking about card capabilities/error handling"

What does the driver version checking actually do? I'm asking this as I'm using a card which is neither ATI nor nVidia, but does support Pixel Shaders 2.0 nevertheless (XGI Volari).

#27

Quote:That's why those of you with pixel shader 1.x cards are not seeing per-pixel specular - the card can't do it.

You can do per pixel specular in 1.x cards - check out article 4.18 in game programming gems 3.

#28 The pixel shader version checking is done using the D3D capabilities queries. The driver version checking is done using the directx diagnostic interface - we warn you if you're running a driver version older than what we've tested. Obviously, for XGI cards, we don't do any checking because we don't have any to work with. :)

#29 Mark - OK, you can't do it purely in the shader - I assume that technique uses a cubemap?

#30 Just a regular texture lookup table. No cubemaps required.

#31 Cool, I'll check it out.

#32 Specular on 1.1 would be brill. The visual quality difference between 1.1 and 2.0 is huge.

#33 There are a lot of neat effects that you can do in 1.1 and or even FF, that can't be done generically or without a big performance hit. Those neat effects are (by and large) stuff we're not focusing on implementing - for instance, Tron has glow even on DX7 hardware, because glow is a huge part of what sells the game. It even runs well. But it's very game specific to pull off, so you're probably not going to see TSE glow running on that low a level of hardware. :)

We're trying to make sure that there's a broad and robust set of basic effects in TSE, and a framework such that if your game needs a certain effect, you can easily stick it in.

This statement probably doesn't apply to the specularity thing, but I think it's important to keep in mind.