vertex shader and DX9

[marcello]

will be posible to enable vertex shader (ro TL unit) on G550 which is disabled only with software (not supporting this feature)? DX9 could make it...

How far did you O/C G550?

[Chrono_Wanderer]

some ppl say that the G550's vertex shaders are not competible with DX, but who knows... the G550's whitepapers say that they are directX 8 level pixel shaders. besides on paper the G550's vertex shaders are somewhat more powerful than the ones on GF4/R8500/R9000 since it can do 256 constant registers.

just modded my G550 a bit... crappy mod tho because of my skills and it's low profile.

[Nowhere]

Read this . In a few words: do you really need t&l (or vertex shader) just for sake of having t&l (vs)?

If it would be usefull on g550 the drivers would enable it from the beginning...

P.S. Chrono_Wanderer, you have some mess in there

[Wombat]

The T&L units on the G550 aren't compatible with anything but ###Casting. Just another Matrox blunder, nothing new.

[marcello]

I know that T&L is not everything but I remember Matrox said that T&L unit is disabled because they dont want to be compared with the other gaming cards. And dont remember that DX8 could not fully support such enhanced vertex shader like has G550. But know here is more developed DX9 and I believe it should support such functions.

[Novdid]

It's not "enhanced" for anything but headcasting, period!!!

[Tomasz]

Well, the g550 is a severely crippled g800 so I would not be surprised if it was theoretically possible to enable the T&L unit for DX 8. But, I do not know what made it to the final silicon of the g550, so I can't say for sure. DX 9 would not help because the g550's vertex shader was not designed for it (Specs weren't finalized at the time).

However, in reality, this might not make much difference because the g550 is limited by its very low memory bandwidth (about the same as the g400 max but 2 years later). And, besides I'm pretty sure that Matrox will not assign anyone on their driver team to work on enabling DX T&L support on the g550. It is a dead issue for them.

[Indiana]

And then todays CPUs are most likely faster at T&L than the G550s Shader could ever be.....

[Nowhere]

Exactly, besides according to the article mentioned by me earlier, even g400 could theorytically do t&l (wonder if that's true though...). But the point is: what for?