SMARTSHADER ™ technology brings a new level of graphic effects to personal computers. It allows software developers to use techniques that until recently were only available to non-interactive computer-generated movie creators and special effects, and brought to interactive computer games, the World Wide Web and content creation applications digital.
ATI's SMARTSHADER ™ technology represents a new generation of hardware accelerated programmable pipelines. The technology was developed with a keen interest in maximizing efficiency and minimizing common performance bottlenecks, especially memory bandwidth. SMARTSHADER ™ technology is an extension of the Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader programming languages introduced by Microsoft in DirectX® 8.0. While these shading languages were a good first attempt to bring programming to the graphics hardware, experimentation revealed that they had a number of limitations that offered many opportunities for improvement.
3D graphics application developers have always had difficulty creating realistic, computer generated characters, objects and environments with which they can interact in real time. The limitation has been the lack of available processing power combined with the restricted flexibility provided by the existing graphics hardware. There has always been a trade-off between performing operations on the CPU, allowing for greater flexibility due to its general and programmable character, and graphics processor, which allows better performance due to its highly optimized hardwired architecture. Although the speed of graphics processors has increased rapidly, and many of the tasks previously handled by the CPU have been constantly assumed, there are many interesting and useful graphical techniques that have remained out of reach because they require a combination of Speed, and flexibility that neither CPUs nor existing graphics processors could adequately provide.
What is needed is a technology that combines the speed and optimizations of a dedicated graphics processor with the flexibility and programmability of a CPU, allowing a virtually infinite range of visual effects at interactive frame rates. Early attempts to introduce this type of technology succeeded in increasing the number of effects available to developers, but they still suffered a number of limitations in terms of versatility and performance. SMARTSHADER ™ technology, developed by ATI, eliminates these limitations to free the imagination of the developers.
SMARTSHADER technology brings a new level of graphic effects to personal computers. It allows software developers to use techniques that until recently were only available to non-interactive computer-generated movie creators and special effects, and brought to interactive computer games, the World Wide Web and content creation applications digital.
ATI's SMARTSHADER technology represents a new generation of hardware accelerated programmable graphics pipelines. The technology was developed with a keen interest in maximizing efficiency and minimizing common performance bottlenecks, especially memory bandwidth.
SMARTSHADER technology is an extension of the Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader programming languages introduced by Microsoft in DirectX® 8.0. While these shading languages were a good first attempt to bring programming to the graphics hardware, experimentation revealed that they had a number of limitations that offered many opportunities for improvement.