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Interesting, but he mentions all these techniques that are available if you have low-level access to the GPU. But on a PC, you never have that because of Direct
by henrikschroder 14y ago
Interesting, but he mentions all these techniques that are available if you have low-level access to the GPU. But on a PC, you never have that because of DirectX and OpenGL, so why do the GPUs have all these hardware functions that are never going to be used by any PC gamer?
- coolnow 14y agoI would think future updates to OpenGL/DX could allow more features of the cards to be used by devs. Otherwise, to use all the features of a card, the game would need to be heavily optimised which increases development time and costs, and then only supports a certain configuration which would be such a small amount of people that all that development wouldn't be worth it.
- kevingadd 14y agoMany of these features are no doubt used by the driver author(s) to implement cool stuff in GL extensions. One particularly crazy example: https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering
- pandaman 14y agoFor the same reason a modern CPU has capabilities far beyond what's exposed through Javascript or Ruby: it's easier to build a simple general purpose device and then implement any API through a software layer than to make hardware implementation of every complex API.
- stewie2 14y agoIt's not because of opengl or directx, it's because of the operating system layer.