Yay! New GPU!
Friday, April 3, 2009 | Permalink
It's good to have friends in the industry.
When my GPU was confirmed dead I replaced it with the only GPU I had laying around that would even produce an image on my screen, which was an old GF 6600 that I used as a debug device for Nvidia specific issues in my demos. While it produced an image it was only able to drive it in a double-pixel mode (1280x800, native is 2560x1600), which was kind of painful and not a state I wanted to be in for longer than necessary. So the first thing I did was to order a new GPU, a HD 4870. However, it didn't take long until I was offered a new GPU, first from AMD and then from Nvidia. So I cancelled the order and waited for the free GPUs instead.
Meanwhile I've been coding a little in double-pixel mode the last two weeks. So now my next framework works on DX9 cards in D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_3 through DX11. Not sure how much of that I will maintain in the future, but I suppose there could be cases where I want a demo to run on older hardware. I've also spent some more time playing around with SSE, moving on to my image class, which I'm also building around SSE. Haven't done much with it yet, but at least I've done a couple of routines for swapping BGRA to RGBA and mipmap generation. SSSE3 has a very convenient instruction for BGRA8 to RGBA8 swapping called pshufb, with which I can swap 4 pixels per instruction. I'm using SSE3 (with just two 'S'es) as the baseline though, so I have also implemented a standard path, which was trickier to do, but 4 pixels in 5 instructions is not bad either.
Now the AMD card has arrived, so I'm back to normal again. It's a HD 4890, which is very nice, especially since it was free.
I haven't had much chance to play around with it yet. I've tried a couple of games and that's about it so far. But this weekend I'm gonna be coding.
ByOrms
Friday, April 3, 2009
congratulations
Michael
Saturday, April 4, 2009
lucky. I just recently got scammed on ebay - I bought & paid for a HD 4870. The seller is now nowhere to be heard from. unlucky for me.
I'm interested in hearing how the 4890 performs for you. Post a pic or two as well!
eXile
Saturday, April 4, 2009
You know you're famous ... if you get GPUs for free :P
n00body
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Any idea when Framework 4 will be ready for prime-time?
Humus
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Probably another few months at least.
