Article on SM3.0

[three_i]

HARDCOP Sm3.0 Article (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjA5)

[This message was edited by three_i on Wed April 28 2004 at 01:45 PM.]

[three_i]

HARDCOP Sm3.0 Article (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjA5)

[This message was edited by three_i on Wed April 28 2004 at 01:45 PM.]

[thedudemanguy]

that's kind of a lousy article for a tech site to have written...

first of all it's been known since the day after nvidia's presentation that the demos did NOT use displacement mapping... they use offset mapping, it makes the texture look protruded on the bump so the bump looks more realistic... it does NOT change geometry and is NOT displacement mapping... even unreal 3 engine specifically called it "VIRTUAL" displacement mapping... and the important thing about this trick is that it has nothing to do with sm 3.0 or ps 3.0... it can be done on pretty much any hardware, although the more advanced pixel shader probably the better performance, but you can almost certainly do it in 2.0 just fine... nvidia simply did not have time to get anyone to write anything that is really truly 3.0 dependant and so unfortunately for them the stuff they showed off won't be proprietary...

and secondly the article doesn't point out something incredibly obvious... the scene's lighting is changed, a different model is used of the buddha... one has arms the other doesn't, it's pretty obvious, and one buddha is fully normal mapped, the other isn't... these things have jackcrap to do with 3.0, with the possible exception of some shadowing effects but because they changed the scenes so dramatically instead of changing parts and pointing them out you can't tell

[lubbe1]

Those screenshots are both Pixel Shader 2.0. The smeghead has taken a screenshot of low and high details.

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