Comments on: NVIDIA GTX 680 OpenGL Bindless Textures Demo

By: Kepler

Kepler — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:58:56 +0000

http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/kepler/NVIDIA-Kepler-GK110-Architecture-Whitepaper.pdf

2880 CUDA cores, Compute Capability 3.5.

By: Pavel

Pavel — Sat, 12 May 2012 14:25:55 +0000

@Leith Bade
No, since D3D10 textures and sample units are not the same. Textures are just shader resource views, maximum number of SRVs are 128(according to MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb173606(v=vs.85).aspx). So you pass SRVs and sampler states to the shader, inside your shader you just take sampler state and use it for SRV sampling. That’s all. ARB_sampler_objects are the same as method proposed in D3D10.

By: sfsf

sfsf — Sat, 12 May 2012 11:12:24 +0000

We need this for all kinds of units, not just textures.

By: sfsf

sfsf — Sat, 12 May 2012 11:11:38 +0000

Bindless is the future!

Seriously because the driver determines how to assign tasks to the texture units it can be build to do this in the most optimal way.

This is only possible with deep information about the hardware. This information is (in theory) only known to the driver developer(s).

There is a real future in making graphics programming faster, easier to debug, more performant and less error-prone.

By: Corwin

Corwin — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:27:06 +0000

good for demomakers probably

By: atikkur

atikkur — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:04:13 +0000

but still, dx-games dont support this feature even in 600series, which is kinda useless to mention. how many opengl games these days?

By: Marc

Marc — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:25:09 +0000

According to David Baumann, AMD’s GCN can do this with it’s Scalar Unit. Don’t know how would the code be though.

By: Mars_999

Mars_999 — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:24:51 +0000

Nice! When the 680 first came out I couldn’t wait to play with this extension, as it should allow for a more rich game environment in future game engines!!!

By: nuninho1980

nuninho1980 — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:57:19 +0000

I have GTX 480. I’m weird if I can run but this demo has still same Shader Model 5.0.

By: Leith Bade

Leith Bade — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:34:30 +0000

@DrBalthar:
From D3D10 docs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb173604(v=vs.85).aspx):
NumSamplers [in]
Type: UINT
Number of samplers in the array. Each pipeline stage has a total of 16 sampler slots available.

D3D10 only has 16 texture units vs 32 for normal OpenGL vs unlimited with the extension.

By: N-K

N-K — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:31:06 +0000

I stated the same as Michal but my message was silently removed which is ultra lame. Maybe the moderator can drop me few lines what the reason was. Bad day?

Anyhow, if it would have been exposed in D3D 10 it would be available as OpenGL ext long time ago (even earlier then D3D 10 i guess).

By: Michal

Michal — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:20:56 +0000

@DrBalthar
Not true. This is new *hardware* feature available only in GTX 600. How could it be part of D3D 10?

By: N-K

N-K — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:13:56 +0000

Of course. I wonder why this requires a modern 680 then if it is apparently from D3D10 times.

By: DrBalthar

DrBalthar — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:34:02 +0000

*Yawn* another feature that has been part of Direct3D since version 10