Pixel Shader 3.0 details slip out

LAST WEEK, we exclusively brought you some information about the upcoming Pixel Shader 3.0 and its introduction. It's interesting that although Pixel Shader 2.0 hardware, implemented in cards like the Radeon 9700 Pro is just becoming available, we're already talking about Pixel Shader 3.0

Pixel Shader 3.0 will be introduced along with Vertex Shader 3.0 and this will happen as soon as DirectX 9 ships. As we said earlier, this is likely to happen in November, let's speculate sometime around Comdex Fall.

The bad thing for developers is that although this info will be available far in advance, there will be no hardware that will support either or both of these shaders. There won't be support for the shaders either in Radeon 9700 Pro or in the NV30 cards.

The good thing for developers is that they will be able to evaluate the technology long before it actually gets supported by hardware, so they can learn in advance about these shaders, possibly leading to early adoption of this advanced technology. This is the roses, rose school of marchitecture.

The main advances of Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0 is that they will have an almost unified instruction set that will reduce the necessity for learning one instruction set each for Pixel and Vertex Shaders.

The new Pixels Shader will get access to Vertex Shader branching and control flow instructions while at the same time the new Vertex Shader VS 3.0 will give access to general texture fetches and some information associated with the colour and the Z Buffer.

From a conceptual point of view it's this unification of instructions that could be of great importance as it will allow a programmer to think of the VPU as a generalised processor -- similar in many ways to a CPU which handles graphics operations.

Knowing that this 3.0 Shader model will be available later this year, along with the introduction of DirectX 9.0, a programmer will be able to consider implementation of these features long before the graphic chip firms' developer relation teams start chasing them to add the new effects supported in their latest and greatest GPU, VPU or graphics CPU.

Industry sources say this is a significant improvement and have even applauded Microsoft for its good work. Gasp. That's 1-0 in the Redmond vs. OpenGl match. µ