"I think it would be a very good idea."
- Gandhi, when asked what he thought about western civilization.
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.

[ 5 comments | Last comment by Humus (2009-04-05 00:56:24) ]