"Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide."
- Napoleon I.

DXOverride update
Wednesday, February 1, 2006 | Permalink

I added the ability to override the backbuffer format. This is useful for instance to set the A2R10G10B10 format on the X1x00 series boards for better color precision.

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tEd
Friday, February 3, 2006

Does this really make a difference? I assume if mostly on high quality lcd's.

Humus
Friday, February 3, 2006

Well, on my 6bit LCD I can't see any difference, but I did play a bit with an A2R10G10B10 backbuffer on a CRT at work and could fairly easily see the difference when outputting a smooth gradient. In most regular games I guess it's not going to look much different though, except maybe in cases with many blended layers. But on the other hand, it's for free, so why not?

tEd
Friday, February 3, 2006

I wondering if you use this format for HDR rendering and also use it as backbuffer , one wouldn't need to do tonemapping?

btw about tonemapping i've heard that the x1x00 video engine could be used in 3dgames to do tonemapping with a trick.

Humus
Saturday, February 4, 2006

With RGB10A2 one would still have to do some tonemapping, but in that case we're probably talking about relatively small ranges, like 0-4, so you could probably get good results with a simpler tonemap operator such as just multiply it up/down to desired range.
The X1K can display FP16 surfaces, so technically they could be used in the framebuffer. The display engine can also do the tonemapping directly. However, DirectX only supports at most 32bit formats to be displayable. It's possible that it will be exposed in an OpenGL extension at some point though.

tEd
Saturday, February 4, 2006

Sounds kinda cool. Aren't there any HDR monitors which could make use of it?

Humus
Sunday, February 5, 2006

Yeah, but I haven't seen any of those in action, so I don't know how good they are. I'd love to have one of those, but I bet they cost an arm and a leg.