Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF) the end to this Filtering Mess

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Brent_Justice

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Incase y'all do not know Microsoft will be completely re-doing the graphics API's for Longhorn, there will be no more DirectX for graphics, it will be Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF) 1.0.

Check this out: http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD04MzA= and http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD04MzE=

Windows Graphics Foundation clearly defines, with literally no wiggle room, what the hardware and driver should do with regards to basic texture filtering, anisotropic filtering and texture and geometry antialiasing.

The result, after discussion with ATI and NVIDIA yesterday? Turn on trilinear anisotropic filtering at 16X and apply multi-sample anti-aliasing and both ATI and NVIDIA's hardware and driver will, via WGF's strict notions of what comprises correct filtering, render identical images, with only the smallest of mathematical differences tolerated.
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Nice find Brent, finaly don't need to worry about fishy driver opts :D
 
How would this affect current generation? Some of those custom optimizations are hardwired/hardcoded into the hardware/games.
 
hmm no they aren't, aa and af are done by drivers, many games just access aa and af with in the drivers so you don't need to worry about turning them on in the control panel. Really won't effect current generation cause this won't be out till 2006.
 
actually it is a combination of hardware and software, for example ATI's cards cannot do angle independent AF, that is hard wired into the chips. they also use less precision for AF calculations, that isn't changable. AFAIK nvidia's AA modes aren't programmable like ATI's are. (they can't change the sample patterns) things like this make it for all intents and purposes impossible to make the current generation produce identical images when AA and/or AF is enabled, driver ops only go further to differentiate the cards' outputs. It will take a new generation of hardware for the IHVs to comply to any sort of rigorous standards on AF and AA
 
And if they won't comply Microsoft will assfuck them. Yay. *sings the Happy Days theme song*
 
oh man now the fan boys are going to have to find something even less consequential to freak out about
 
joobjoob said:
oh man now the fan boys are going to have to find something even less consequential to freak out about
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I can see it now, "OMFG Nvidia sux0r they used .5 million more transistors to get the same quality af" or "OMFG ATI sux0r they are just barely within tolerances! I can easily see the small differences in 20 pixels while fragging someone at 300 fps"

I guess ati and nvidia will have to differentiate themselves with flat out better performance.
 
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