[Irinikus]

A demonstration of the Onyx2, "Bump Logo demo", on an SGI Tezro. Just bear in mind that this demo was produced in the 90's and as far as I can recall, bump mapping only become available in the PC gaming context, when DirectX 11 was released!

[Intuition]

Amazing what we take for granted today in vfx. Having some bump with a broken up specularity channel and reflection was some high tech business back then.

[Irinikus]

Amazing what we take for granted today in vfx. Having some bump with a broken up specularity channel and reflection was some high tech business back then.

It's great to have grown up in the 80's and 90's, as it really gives one an appreciation of what we take for granted today!

[bkd]

A demonstration of the Onyx2, "Bump Logo demo", on an SGI Tezro. Just bear in mind that this demo was produced in the 90's and as far as I can recall, bump mapping only become available in the PC gaming context, when DirectX 11 was released!

You're not right.) Bump-mapping techniques was been available to PC hardware from ~ 1996-1997, but maybe with not that high precision of calculations. Examples: EMBM - per-pixel lighting effects first implemented in hardware by Matrox (G400, 1998) and DOT3 - more mathematically correct, first implemented in NV10 (1999). Even DX 9.0c (2004) gives far greater possibilities and precision than IR/VPro (FP16 vs INT12). Through DX11 one can achieve VERY advanced effects like path tracing (which includes ray tracing) calculated with very high precision - FP32 (fragments).

[Irinikus]

I accept that I'm wrong here!

EDIT: I'm sorry, I've confused hardware tessellation with bump mapping, I'm sorry!

[bkd]

Oh, there were MANY of them and it was YEARS before even first Stalker). For example Expendable (1999, EMBM), Drakan (1999, also EMBM), Evolva (2000, DOT3), Giants (2000, also DOT3) and so on. You can try for example Far Cry 1 with lastest patch (2004) - it uses bump mapping (per-pixel lighting) A LOT with high accuracy (SM2.0/3.0, FP16, but some settings require console tuning). For example I also have a demo for NV10 (GeForce 256) that demonstrates per-pixel lighting on walls from moving point light sources (but unfortunately with low precision due to its internal int9 register combiner format). And it was 1999 hardware!

---

I accept that I'm wrong here!

EDIT: I'm sorry, I've confused hardware tessellation with bump mapping, I'm sorry!

Oh it's alright.)) As far as I remember even IR4 (and VPro 99%) doesn't support tesselation. Are you sure this demo uses it?

[Irinikus]

I agree that none of SGI’s demos employ hardware tessalation,as far as I’m aware.

I got confused between the introduction of bump mapping and hardware tessalation, as hardware tessalation was introduced into gaming with DirectX 11, and everything that came before that seemed so insignificant at the time.

That was a huge step forward. (When employed correctly that is.)

[bkd]

First (as far as I know) implementation of tesselation (hardware of course) was NV20 (GeForce 3) in 2001 - by means of so called RT-patches. There were tech demos with this technology but support in games was limited. Radeon also supports similar techniques.

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/nv20/index.html - "Support for hardware tesselation of smooth surfaces (rectangular and triangular patches)";
With and without tesselation: http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/gf3/rtpatch.jpg, http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/gf3/rtpatch2.jpg.

[Irinikus]

You're right as to when it first came about, however it it was only truly implemented at the consumer or gaming level with the advent of shader model 5 in DirectX 11.

Here's a link to an article discussing the subject: http://rastergrid.com/blog/2010/09/histo...sellation/

Here's an excerpt from this article:



In my original post I mentioned "the PC gaming context"

The first time I ever saw Hardware tessellation "properly" demonstrated was in "Unigine Heaven":





The first game that I ever played, featuring Hardware tessellation was Stalker Clear Sky: