Comment Re:The Standard is always long to come (Score 1) 126
> There is no professional graphics application available that uses Direct3D for rendering.
I guess it depends on what you mean by professional. I was also refering to Max which uses both OpenGL and Direct3D, although it also includes its own custom Heidi driver. And last time I checked (which was quite a long time ago) Martin Hashs 3d applications had switched to Direct3D, but again I dont know if you consider it professional either. Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, Houdini of course are OpenGL based. There are also a lot of smaller applications I wouldnt label consumer (they are expensive and not usefull for consumers) but more professional that use Direct3D, but they are almost not worth mentioning.
> And they don't much care about OpenGL 2.0, because they have little use for pixel and vertex shaders.
Actually, I'm seeing more game developers moving to Maya, and if that is the case, you will see a lot more interest in using a lot of the 2.0 features for developing game content. Its not so important for feature film kind of work but for game developement it is important. Newtek may be interested in it, they were demonstrating in some of their newer versions of Lightwave (6.x and up) using a lot more OpenGL features and doing tricks that game developers use in their editors, more so then I have seen from other packages, its nice to see lens flares and fog when your animating a scene, instead of having to render a few frames to see what it looks like.
> They really just want high performance fixed-function transformation (no, your new Geforce 4 can't compete well here), fast gourad shaded triangles and blazingly quick antialiased lines.
Last I heard the wildcat line of cards were pretty dominant in this area. But at the same time it depends on what you are doing, game developement, tv, or film. For Film they usually want the best quality and will want something to really push the detail levels really high. TV and game cinematics it's a little lower, althought there is some that push as hard as some of the low end films. With real time aspects of games, your dealing with 800 poly for low end and 80k for high end characters (Depending on the platform and/or hardware), and just about any consumer card can be used to handle that.
I guess it depends on what you mean by professional. I was also refering to Max which uses both OpenGL and Direct3D, although it also includes its own custom Heidi driver. And last time I checked (which was quite a long time ago) Martin Hashs 3d applications had switched to Direct3D, but again I dont know if you consider it professional either. Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, Houdini of course are OpenGL based. There are also a lot of smaller applications I wouldnt label consumer (they are expensive and not usefull for consumers) but more professional that use Direct3D, but they are almost not worth mentioning.
> And they don't much care about OpenGL 2.0, because they have little use for pixel and vertex shaders.
Actually, I'm seeing more game developers moving to Maya, and if that is the case, you will see a lot more interest in using a lot of the 2.0 features for developing game content. Its not so important for feature film kind of work but for game developement it is important. Newtek may be interested in it, they were demonstrating in some of their newer versions of Lightwave (6.x and up) using a lot more OpenGL features and doing tricks that game developers use in their editors, more so then I have seen from other packages, its nice to see lens flares and fog when your animating a scene, instead of having to render a few frames to see what it looks like.
> They really just want high performance fixed-function transformation (no, your new Geforce 4 can't compete well here), fast gourad shaded triangles and blazingly quick antialiased lines.
Last I heard the wildcat line of cards were pretty dominant in this area. But at the same time it depends on what you are doing, game developement, tv, or film. For Film they usually want the best quality and will want something to really push the detail levels really high. TV and game cinematics it's a little lower, althought there is some that push as hard as some of the low end films. With real time aspects of games, your dealing with 800 poly for low end and 80k for high end characters (Depending on the platform and/or hardware), and just about any consumer card can be used to handle that.
