Very impressed so far with my Radeon...

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
21

Seems that we all may have misjudged ATI. In all fairness my first email to them was sent on Monday morning - Sunday night their time - silly me

Here’s what a rep said (me in bold, him in normal text):

Your bumpmapping demo seems to be down - it’d be nice to take a look at that.
The drivers on the web and the sample app are out of synch. The ATIX extension for dot3 has been deprecated and we wanted to get the specs and updated source up asap so that people stopped writing to the ATIX version and didn’t ship content on it (recall SGIS_multitexture). We probably should have waited for the drivers to propagate through the system, however. If you ping devrel@ati.com, you may be able to get access to our private download area to get later drivers (though the EXT_texture_env_dot3 version may not be there yet either).

When do you plan to have the vertex blending/streams specifications ready? The glATI.h file has these as ARB extensions, but the driver has them as ATI extensions.
The extension was recently ratified. This is a case of the driver you have being a bit too old.

Finally, do you have any plans to expose EMBM through OpenGL? That’d give nVidia something else to worry about
This will happen. There are just other things in the pipe ahead of it. I noticed their “EMBM” demo on their site recently. I didn’t know a single quad could be rendered so slowly (it’s basically software rendering I think)! You’re right, we’ll have to make hay with that one.

So there you go, some good answers. Seems quite a rosey outlook - and after everyone here gave ATI a bit of pain we got a bit of cheeky nVidia bashing back off them!

Paul.

[This message has been edited by Pauly (edited 10-24-2000).]

22

The question is now when they’ll get the new drivers out!!

23

Originally posted by Gorg:
The question is now when they’ll get the new drivers out!!

Hum…

This question goes to nVidia as well !

Eric

24

It’s completely beyond my control… our release schedules are dicated by 10,000 other factors that I know little about.

  • Matt
25

Hmm,

I downloaded the beta drivers and they have ATIX_texture_env_subtract, dunno if thats orthogonal to EXT_blend_subtract…

[This message has been edited by Pauly (edited 10-26-2000).]

26

A subtract environment would be completely unrelated to the blend.

Sounds like ATI’s taking the approach of extending texture environments piecemeal, one tiny piece at a time.

In theory we could implement a subtract extension, but (1) for subtract to be really interesting, you want signed arithmetic, which requires a much bigger extension (such as register combiners), (2) no one has really requested it, and (3) if you just want error correction terms, the most common reason for wanting a subtract, you can do the same thing with ADD_SIGNED in either combine or combine4, which allows you to either add or subtract x-0.5, where x is some value (say, a texture).

  • Matt