JeGX's Infamous Lab

Archive for the ‘OpenGL’ Category

I’ve just found in the super paper of ATI, called “ATI OpenGL Programming and Optimization Guide” that all ATI GPUs from the R300 (Radeon 9700) to the latest R580 (Radeon X1900) only support NEAREST (and the mipmap version) filtering for depth map. That explains the previous results. So if you want a nVidia-like depth map filtering, you have to code the filtering yourself in the pixel shader. Okay, this answer suits me!

Really ATI has some problems with OpenGL. Now I’m working on soft shadows and my tmp devstation has a Radeon X700 (not the top-notch I know but an enough powerful CG). With my X700 (Catalyst 6.6) the soft shadow edges are rendered as follows:

And on my second CG, a nVidia 6600gt (forceware 91.31), the soft shadows are as follows:

The GLSL shaders are the same, a 5×5 bluring kernel, with a shadow map (or depth map as you want) of 1024×1024 (via a FBO) with a linear filtering. Now if I set the nearest filtering mode, I get the following results for the X700:

and for the 6600gt:

It seems as if the Radeon GPU has a bug in the filtering module when the gpu has to apply a linear filter on a depth map. Very strange.
I’m not satisfied by this explanation but it’s the only I see for the moment.

This kind of problem shows how it’s important for a graphics developer to have at least 2 workstations, one with a nVidia board and the other with an ATI CG. I tell you, realtime 3D is made of blood, sweat and screams! :winkhappy:

It’s nice to come back to code!

I’m currently working on a new and simple framework for my OpenGL experimentations before implementing the algorithms in the oZone3D Engine . RaptorGL is a little bit too heavy for simple tests so for the moment I drop it. This new framework I called XPGL (eXPerimental Graphics Library), allows me to quickly test the new algos I’m working on. Every time I have to code a little but fully operational 3D demo in c++/opengl, I spend lot of time for a small result. In these moments, I say to myself that Hyperion is a very cool tool.

Okay, let’s see a weird behavour of radeon gpu. At the moment, my graphics controller is a Radeon X700. With the latest catalyst drivers (6.6), this graphics board should be an OpenGL 2.0 compliant CG. A little check to the GL_VERSION tells me the X700 is GL2 compliant. Then the X700 should handle non power of two texture since this feature is part of the OpenGL 2.0 core. But the GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two string is not found in the GL_EXTENSIONS. Maybe ATI does not mention the extensions that are part of the core. Anyways, I loaded a 600×445 npot-texture on a mesh plane and the X700 seems to support this texture. But with a ridiculous fps of 1… Software codepath? I think so! So I decided to load the same texture with power of two dims (512×512) and the fps is become decent again. With my gf6600gt (with the forceware 91.31) I never noticed this effect/bug because the GL2-support is better and nVidia gpus correctly support non power of two texture. You can download the demo with the npot and pot texture (the one mapped onto the mesh plane) hereafter and do the test for yourself. Feel free to drop me a feedback if you wish.

NPOT_Demo.zip (659k)

But keep in mind that graphics hardware is optimized for POT textures. Try to use POT textures in order to maximize your chances to see your demo running everywhere.

I’ve just received an email from an user saying that he was’nt able to run the demos of the Vertex Displacement Mapping Tutorial on his brand new Radeon X1900XTX. VTF or Vertex Texture Fetching is a cool feature of high-end graphics chipsets and it’s part of Shader Model 3.0. The X1900 series is based on the R500 chipset (R580) that is a SM3.0 complient GPU. But in OpenGL side and especially in GLSL, VTF is not supported. The OpenGL query done with GL_MAX_VERTEX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS_ARB always returns 0. That means that no texture units are available in the vertex shader.

ATI confirms this fact in one of its whitepapers shipped with the ATI SDK (ATI OpenGL Programming and Optimization Guide.pdf). At the page 11, we can read this: [i]“All ATI graphics HW have a few items that deserve special consideration when using GLSL. The first major item of note is the absence of vertex texture units. This means that vertex texturing is never available, and all shaders attempting to use texture functions in the vertex shader will fail to link.”[/i]. I know, this is a rude reality. The R580 GPU is really powerful and it’s a pity that ATI does not support VTF in his chipsets. I don’t know how the R580 behaves in D3D side but I can suppose the GPU has the same limitations. VTF is currently supported by Geforce chipset from 6600 to 7900. Conclusion: if you wish to play with VTF, use a nVidia board.

Maybe, all these problems will be solved with the SM4.0. I hope! :winkhappy: