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Beleive it or not, Natasha's show gave me a little inspiration and ideas of how some pixel shader effects work. At least theoritically. And concerning some other discussions I had, I think now that pixel shaders is nothing else than defining the calcs between two textures. It's like doing alpha blending or anything, but this time it's you who code (in some limited kind of asm language) what function will happen between the two textures. And as I have also noticed, most of her effects was nothing else rather than precalculating some noise textures (fractal? perlin noise? plasma? anything?) and adding them together or something. Even the fire effect wasn't the oldschool one (People were bragging: "Is she gonna teach us how to do a fire effect?! :P" ;) but just adding and scrolling a noise texture upon a vertical gradient if I recall well. (Not the oldschool fire which is cooler, but at least less calcs (2 reads and adds, not 4), mmm.. perhaps it works faster on CPC than a regular fire (Really! :)

Nevertheless. What I think now is that software rendering still rules. Why? People were telling me that pixel shaders will drag me away from software rendering (because it sucks and DOS sucks too attitude =). But what I still miss is: PIXEL PER PIXEL CONTROL!!! In pixel shaders, you are still constructing actions between textures. Still not what I want. People are lying to me when they say that software will come back with pixel shaders :P

PIXEL PER PIXEL WILL NEVER DIE!!!

I want to say something about software demos now. I had seen one from TG and one from Birdie. Good,. smooth here, but boring. I think that's because many people who do software demos are doing a software 3d engine. Cool, but 3d accelerators can do them better. Perhaps I can only get it with few effects they had like distortion or blur, but I think that a cool software demo must have the high detail of elements that you can hardly find in 3d acceleration. Raytracing, voxels and a lot, lot, lot 2d effects combined together with the 3d action. Heaven7 is a favorite software demo of mine. Live Evil too. MyWorld too. Blending a lot of 2d software effects on the 3d buffer, lotsa filters, some fractals, some raytracing, anything that we can rarely see anymore. So why another software demo that mostly looks like what my 3d acceleration card can do better? If you still want to build a software 3d engine, manage to fill the buffer with a lot of filters, or put some neat 2d effects in beetween the scenes. I love 2d effects and anything more than polygons :)

THE SOFTWARE RENDERING SCENE IS DEAD.

I think I am gonna make it into software rendering under Windows sooner or later. There exist more ideas than polygons..

better quality

But still, no pure PIXEL PER PIXEL feeling..

yes it has

Nevertheless, I need a state of the art hardware to do it. Thing that could, will not run on my Pentium 2 I have here..

There are not a lot of 2D effects which i have not seen done on 3d hardware anymore.. Maybe voxel landscapes is the only thing.. I want metaballs with muddy voxels mapped on the surfaces.. and when the metaballs move up to speed, the mud starts to splatter all over the place.. ;) But im not going to do that yet,.

2d effects simulated by a plane grid of polygons sucks. Nothing beats the great feeling of pure pixel per pixel rendering!!!

use PTC :P

optimus: can't you just say "i like software rendering" in so many words? :)

"I think now that pixel shaders is nothing else than defining the calcs between two textures."

Well, no. No, it's not.

HARDWARE IS SOFTCORE
SOFTWARE IS HARDCORE

eat that motherfuckers!

Go read up on this stuff before you start talking shit, Optimus. It's getting annoying now. These comparisons you make also show that even a proper understasnding software rendering is far out of your league.

"understanding of", Of course.

Its not about pixels, its about rendering technique, iterative or linear..

i dont know anything about hardware yet, but im going to try directx very soon, and im wondering, do i have the chance to play with my dear pixels with pixelshaders?

Optimus: the guys art my university here have already implemented Conway's Game of Life, 2D fluid dynamics simulation, and lotsa other traditional stuff. So please read up better, there is more that can be done with shaders than you think - i believe the oldskool fire is possible as well, because all it always was is blurring and shifting up. And at much higher performance. Of course, shaders are less generic than pure software - but it is for performance. Nontheless, with some brain inside you can transform most problems into the form which in one way or another involves testure combination and this is shaderable. And hey, if you missed Mojo World 4k, you missed everything you bastard. :> It was the best tribute to shaders.

Quisten: your question makes no sense. There is no absolute mystery in this world.

You mean you got a stiffy??

One thing, how could you shade a pixel? :P

One thing, how could you shade a pixel? :P

Optimus: SHUT THE FUCK UP!!

oh.

let me reiterate..

Optimus: SHUT THE FUCK UP!!1

i dont give a fuck about natasha's show but a few words

SOFTWARERENDERING RULZ
RAYTRACING OWNS

using d3d/gl is oh so simple way to get into scene for lamers. some of them cannot even write polyfiller fast enough...

Quisten: I love that quote! :)

To you all: I don't know about pixelshaders but if I wish to make some simple (or not so simple) software effects that can run on my Pentium 2, why use pixel shaders? But who cares,. I am gonna present you my new group soon, F.A.P.S. (Federation Against Pixel Shaders). BEWARE!!! =)

mft: Cool, but I think that just about nobody can write a fast polyfiller today. I think that I still enjoy watching some really impressive 3d stuff on my 486 or early Pentium at full frame rate, while most of the modern software demos with simple polys require a 1 or 2Ghz machine to run at something like 25fps. At least I think so..

mtf: i started out in sofware, just to get the feeling on who stuff works, now im off to hardware .... but software is greate, you can play alot , and i love to play :D

The reason software polyfillers are so slow nowadays is because the only people who are still writing them are people who don't (want to) understand and use modern hardware.

mft: sure, noone can write a polyfiller faster than hardware. (but there's an s-buffer :> ) Besides, even the most optimized vertex transformation on the CPU is much, much slower than any GFX card would do for you.

Nontheless, i feel really bad when watching OpenGL demos and intros which barely move, despite little geometry - someone exaplain teh lamers, glVertex3f is not the way!

And by the way, i've been reading a lot about attempts to make/fake raytracing using pre-shader hardware - and it's almost possible, by smart combination of hardware and really optimized software. But transferring anything to hardware takes time - so even if shaders were not faster, they nontheless allow to implement a ton of stuff avoiding the transfer! And it makes really new stuff possible.