CrySIS FarCry2...
 

the new engines... u know, elder scrolls IV is interesting, unreal3 demos were way cool... then project offset , do this on their basement, then the guys at crytek go and relese this
cryengine 2 video

dóh wont u love to have all those features one "hardware renderer" button press away? its a pity that gelato didnt actually delivered...

You do.. only thing is its not as easy as it looks to create all these shaders and such. Maya spoiled you with sliders, checkers, and fileinputs -- its not so easy when you physically need to create a list of dot-products for the flop-pump of a GPU to process.

Some game companies have "render farms" specifically to precompile shaders.

yeah im spoiled... my point is: i want to be spoiled even more, now!, as opposed to in a few years...


you mean they have to to pregenerate maps for lighing, normals, irradiance,translucence,caustics(just as it happens when you hit render on mr)... but, you see, in the crytek2 demo you get at the very least soft shadows,HDRI,SSS, Volumetric Fog, volumetric clouds, Depth of Field, and motion blur(just the same as if you toy with the DXSDK)... all in real time, and looks to me that those cant be precalculated...(not to mention they promise every plant is a dynamic collidable object and all the buildings and prop models breakable!) i just was wondering: if they can do those on the gpu... whi i have to wait 5 to 20 minutes for the cpu to make each one of the same each frame?

Erm -- they precalculated but not in the way you're thinking of. Basically -- each shader is a program... and every program needs to be compiled -- that's what they do. In Maya -- shaders are NOT programs... thus they are run without being compiled (which is slow... the GPU doesn't have a specific compiled program to run...).

To rephrase -- shaders in games and shaders in Maya are two different things. Games shaders are mini, precomputed programs (they may be realtime, but they're precomputed programs)

well you see i knew, but if what you say about game companys having a farm to compile them its true then the new pixel shaders have taken an exponential jump on compile time... cause a pair of months ago when i toyed with the DXSDK, rendermonkey and Cg the compilation times were negligible... Anyways, even if compilation time has risen exponentially, librarys of precompiled effects can be made... dont you think so?

take SSS faking on a hardware shader... got the example, breezed trough the code... (admitedly didnt understand most of it...) hit compile... wait a pair of seconds, hit preview: the supplied model of a butterfly works perfect, hunt for the model name on the code, substitute for my own .x hit compile, one second, hit preview: black... read the comments... oh a map of how much the light goes trough the model has to be pregenerated... THAT took 14 minutes to pregenerate with a tool supplied...

My problem still is managing to integrate .fx(s) on my render pipeline in a way that is useful...

the fact that .fx are just text files that are complied on realtime by the cg dll and can be previwed almost instantly even on the maya work window leads me to think that (at least "old tech") shaders take very little power to compile

whats more: the fact that you can go to the nicely labeled "shaders" folder of DOOM3/battlefield2, etc open the files in there with a text editor and read (altough understand/modify is another matter enterly) the code leds me to believe STRONGLY that it doesnt takes so much to complie even on modern engines...