Geforce FX - Is it still DirectX 9 compliant?

[~*McoreD*~]

Thursday 12 December 2002, 19:31

I DID A HUGE INQUIRY into what you need to be DirectX 9 compliant after I saw some chit-chat, and possibly very important news, over at Reactor Critical.
That's because some folks over yonder claimed that the new and upcoming Nvidia Geforce FX does not support displacement mapping --- a key element of Microsoft DirectX 9.

The guys and gals are right. Geforce FX does not have support for displacement mapping proposed by obscure little Matrox and implemented as a part of DirectX 9 but this still does not mean that Geforce FX is not DX 9 compliant, it emerged.

Knowledgeable sources now tell us that you simply don't need Displacement mapping to be fully DirectX 9 compliant, and we also learned that Nvidia does support displacement mapping, although with some differences, you won't be surprised to read.

This pretty much leads to the same situation that we saw with DirectX 8.1 and N patches support that were supported by ATI in its Radeon 8500 generations, while Nvidia didn't support that specific implementation on its DirectX 8 compliant Geforce 3 and 4.

It's all rather confusing, don't you think, dear readers?

Nvidia was using a method called polynomial surfaces that was even more effective since it had support for adaptive tessellation -- something that can possibly save you some processing power -- but at the same time requires that objects and characters be remade in a programmer's mind.

Who can map a programmer's mind?

As for displacement mapping, we are almost certain that there are more than one implementations and the same rather knowledgeable source claims there are several ways to make it so.

Still, pixel and vertex shaders 2.0 and beyond are far more important for DirectX 9 support and we are quite sure there will be more about this ? when it emerges, that is.

Don't forget that displacement mapping is not a requirement of DX 9. Geforce FX, please kindly come and put us out of our misery.

So this means that Geforce FX, apart from the claims aforementioned, is a fully DirectX 9 compliant card.