about pixel shader 3.0

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macdawg

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One guy here says he plays far cry & other games on a 6600 gt with pixel shader 3.0 on.

How do you turn on pixel shader 3.0? How do you know your using it?

I know a guy that says there is nothing pixel shader 3.0 does that 2.0 cannot do.

And he says "Ps3.0 allows for more registers so it's easier to code for. by the time ps3.0 games come out current cards would barely be able to run them so buying a 6800gt right now to play ps3.0 games when they come out next year is useless. For example, unreal 3 has been tested with the 6800ultra and the x800xt and they ran at around 5-10fps with all the eye candy on."

And told me to read this "PC Perspective recently ran an interview with Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek, the company that developed Far Cry. In it, Yerli stated, "In current engine there are no visible difference between PS2.0 and PS3.0. PS3.0 is used automatically for per-pixel lighting depending on some conditions to improve speed of rendering."

I think this is interesting because the reason why everyone here recommends nvidia now is because of PS3, but a lot of people say it makes no difference.

Discuss.
 
I know a guy that says there is nothing pixel shader 3.0 does that 2.0 cannot do.
That guy is an ATI fanboy and is just pissed his card doesn't support it like nvidias has forever.

Generally that applies for all people who say PS3 isn't needed....fact is when these games like FEAR, STALKER, PREY and whatnot start coming out they will be making more use of it, and currently the only ATI card that'll run with it is the new R520 which will be expensive as hell.
 
Also keep in mind that Far Cry is one of the few games to use Pixel Shader 2.0. most devs jumped straight from 1.1/1.4 to 3.0
 
Basically, developers have skipped pixel shader 2.0 and went straight from 1.1 to 3.0. And the difference between 1.1 and 3.0 is HUGE! 2.0 is very complex to code in, and yes, it can do many things that PS 3.0 can do, but it takes far more coding and you get far less performance. These include things like parallax mapping and HDR effects. Basically, if you plan on playing games like F.E.A.R., S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Half Life 2 "The Lost Coast", Age of Empires 3, and many others, you will need a pixel shader 3.0 capable card, which the only ones right now are the GeForce 6 series. Current games like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory also make use of Shader Model 3 to improve eye candy. The game looks a heck of a lot different with all the SM3 effects enabled than it does without it. In fact, this game required SM3 to even run in DX9 mode! Even if you have an X850XT, you still play SCCT in DX8.1! This means that it will look the same on an old GeForce 3 card as it will on the ATI flagship card of today. Even if you are an ATI fanboy, don't waste your money on an X800 card (dale will tell you otherwise, don't listen to him), wait for the X900XT, which WILL feature shader model 3.
 
ATI users will be able to play Stalker, FEAR, AoE3, just at DX 8.1 levels. which aint bad, but not nearly as good as it should be.


EDIT: If dale talks, covers your ears and say "blah blah blah blah"
 
dhw200 said:

EDIT: If dale talks, covers your ears and say "blah blah blah blah"

You know he's going to be here telling us how SM3.0 doesn't matter and that the games will play fine even in DX8.1 mode. He will probably throw in something about America's Army and how the X800 series pwns any Nvidia in that game.

EDIT - After being used to graphics in DX9 games like Far Cry and HL2, DX8.1 games do indeed look bad in comparison. It blows my mind that $500+ cards today from ATI will only be capable of DX8.1 in the future because of this failure.
 
i played AA for awhile on a Dell integrated gfx chip. so u can assume that it aint demanding :p
 
Yeah, and dale5605 uses that game and the temporal anti-aliasing feature (which i think sucks), as the reason everybody should go out and buy X800 series cards.
 
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