Re: High Level Shading & Gaming Industry

[Guy Rabiller <guy(at)alamaison.fr>]

Thanks for your input Wessam.


> ../.. Cross-platform support? For what? Linux? FreeBSD?
> These are not OSs that gamers use ../..

What about the Mac ?


But, lets say that both support for DirectX and OpenGL is needed.
From your <personal>opinion</personal> would it be preferable to only 
support Cg or only HLSL/GLSL ?

--
guy rabiller | 3d technical director (at) LaMaison



Wessam Bahnassi a écrit :
> HLSL is well-integrated within the DirectX SDK and is very easy to use and
> integrate out of the box. If the game (or even the whole company) is not
> going to use OpenGL, then why bother with Cg? And thanks to the Xbox, your
> HLSL code can be easily ported to Xbox and 360, whereas Cg doesn't compile
> for these targets...
>
> <personal opinion>
> Well, asking about whether to choose Cg or HLSL is similar to asking whether
> to use OpenGL or Direct3D. As you know, most PC game titles today use
> Direct3D as a 3D API.
>
> Now, from a 3D Engine developer point-of-view, it's a big waste of time to
> support both D3D and OGL. Cross-platform support? For what? Linux? FreeBSD?
> These are not OSs that gamers use. But Xbox, and Xbox360 (which are D3D-only
> based) are widely distributed. PS2 and PS3 do not use OGL as their graphics
> API so the engine will still have to support these in a different code path
> anyways whether it supports OGL or not...
> </personal opinion>
>
> Performance-wise, one might argue that Cg delivers better performance on
> nVidia hardware because the compiler knows exactly what's running beneath
> it. This fact will mostly change with D3D10 now as the compilation of HLSL
> will be moved to the driver itself, which means nVidia ca provide the same
> optimization capabilities as they do with the Cg compiler (unless if they
> intentionally don't want to :)
>
> Wessam Bahnassi
> Microsoft DirectX MVP,
> Programmer
> Electronic Arts
> --
> In|Structurez Arabic Gamedev Community
> www.instructurez.com
>
>   
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-3dgames(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-3dgames(at)Softimage.COM] On
> > Behalf Of Guy Rabiller
> > Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 3:22 AM
> > To: 3DGames(at)Softimage.COM
> > Subject: High Level Shading & Gaming Industry
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm trying to gather usefull informations about high level shading
> > habits and usages in the gaming industry.
> >
> > So far, and afaik, there are HLSL, GLSL & Cg among the most used high
> > level shading languages available.
> >
> > I've seen that most engines are trying to support all of these, some
> > only support one.
> >
> > The kind of questions I have in mind is for instance:
> >
> > What the point of supporting HLSL & GLSL if Cg is able to handle both
> > OpenGL and DirectX ?
> >
> > Do you think it would be reasonable to only support Cg ? Are there any
> > strong reasons why an engine should support Cg and HLSL for instance ?
> >
> > I'm thinking about one: Gaming Console ( especialy XBox for instance
> > where HLSL is mandatory, afaik ).
> >
> > But outside the gaming console world, would there be any reason at all ?
> > Performance may be ?
> >
> > What are your thoughts/informations about this matter ?
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any hint.
> >
> > --
> > guy rabiller | 3d technical director (at) LaMaison
> >     
>
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