Marks worklog

Mark says in his latested work log that you will need a kick ass graphics card for max3d. what he means by this worrys me? ive got a 9800pro and very little money to upgrade at the moment is it worth me buying bmax3d when it comes out if its going to run really slow. mark only has a 9800pro himself so theres hope.

Pete

http://blitzmax.com/Community/posts.php?topic=62677

You need quite a kick ass graphics card to run max2d, so why should this bother anyone?

sorry didnt see the post in the max forum. still doesnt clear things up really, so i guess its just a wait and see.

i have a 9800pro and that does opengl 2.0 which as far as know is the latest version, so it should work, maybe it wont be at 60 fps but it should be good enough.

Pete

You should get your facts right before making statements like that. With updated OpenGL drivers, Max2D has been shown to run on some very old graphics cards with good FPS.

:)

I can run most of the MAX demos on my wifes ATI Radeon 7000... win 2k... 512ram no problem!

Max2d works just fine on my Dell with a crappy integrated intel gpu.

My graphics card kicks ass so I'm not too worried :p

I can just imagine the specs on games made with blitzmax...

Minumum:
AMD/Intel processor 1GHz+
512MB+ ram
DX9 Graphics

Recommended:
AMD/Intel processor 2GHz+
1GB ram
Kick ass(tm) graphics


hehe

I would like to see some in dev-screenshots of the current 3d engine...

Max2D is enough for me and runs fine on my crudy P3 mobile laptop

Max2D is pretty nice on my Mac with a GeForce 4. I wouldn't exactly say that's a high-end gfx card.. around 1 billion texels/second whereas the high end is well above 8-10 billion/second ie 8-10 times faster.

Yes, it does:

Max3D will initially require an ATI X series or nVidia 6 series graphics card. Max3D will initially require Shader v3 capable cards. Max3D will initially be OpenGL only. A DirectX version may come down the track (very very likely). Compatibility for older gfx cards may come down the track. Mark's signature is likely to be out of date (DirectX 9.0b huh?). Max3D has been touted as 'next-gen' since the very beginning, so why his worklog has surprised or 'worried' anyone is beyond me. Max3D is still a work in progress so specs given here are subject to change (my guess is that change would mean higher requirements however, since next gen is constantly progressing, not regressing) before release.

Apparently it didn't for you because :



Whereas Mark said :

Yup that's all very good, but there's a distinct difference between certain ATI X series cards, nVidia 6 series cards and their lower counterparts. Shader v3 is the most obvious.


If the only cards on the market that have a decent shader instruction count are SM3 cards, then that kind of means SM3 is going to be a requirement. Right?

Why do you assume that when Mark says he was just guestimating, he's not referring to precisely this remark about ATI X and nVidia 6 series? I can't find anything else that he could have been "guestimating about" apart from that precise remark.


It's exactly this kind of flawed logic that Mark criticizes in that thread. Firstly, he says it's just a guestimate, not a specific requirement. Secondly, it's a flawed premise because the only cards on the market that have a decent shader instruction count are NOT SM3 cards. Far Cry is a pretty shader-heavy game ( engine ) and I'm not aware of a single SM3-only effect in the game. In fact, a surprising amount of the effects in Far Cry are possible with SM 1.4 and the rest are 2.0.

Isn't the whole shader stuff optional, so you could skip it on an older card that doesn't support it?

I was wondering the same jfk, or why not use a shader that uses older features? Or maybe Im missing something (I probably am)

What relevance does that have? Pete wanted clarity and I gave him just that - based on what little info is out there and the fact that Mark's 'guestimate' has gone up since the tech demo he posted so many months ago - which minimum requirements were more or less an ATI 9 series and a nVidia 5 series card. The fact that his guestimate is one notch up in tech suggests to me that his tech requirements are going up alongside general next gen tech evolution.


It also ran like crap on most SM2 hardware.


Mark criticised people taking it as gospel. Anyone in their right mind would not take information about a work in progress as gospel. I think it much more likely that this estimate will likely be increased by the time the product is released - and it's pretty definate in my mind that if the specs are in fact lower, that it would be that one notch, as opposed to GeForce 4 or 2, as your rambling would lead one to believe.

Oh really? Well, i enjoyed it a lot on my 9800er were it was running great without any crashes or hickups and i also do remember some positive benchmarks/reviews about it on SM2 hardware so it seems that i wasn't the only one. I really don't know how you came to your conclusion.

No.

SM3 is simply more elegant. The most obvious advantages are dynamic branching and long (more than) 96 instructions for pixel shaders.

Guess I have to stick with MiniB3D then.