flupke
Newbie
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2003
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Hi there,
This may sound a little like a stupid question..
What i don't get, is, when Valve started to work on the HL2 Source engine (when was that exactly btw?) it must've been a long time ago, 1999 for example. So, you had that technologie then already? But, that couldn't be true, because the engine uses DirectX 9 and that's 'just' released. So, i'm totally confused
. There will probably be a simple explanation, but please share it with me.
Thanks a lot, hope to hear from you soon!
Mathijs Delva
__________________________________________________
Gabe's answer :
We started work in 1998 when we shipped HL-1. Anytime you are working on something this long, you have to plan pretty far ahead, whether it's DX features or CPU speeds or fill rate or shader depths, or broadband adoption or whatever.
For example CPU price/performance is ahead of where we originally thought it would be (you have to remember that HL-1 had a "minimum" CPU speed of 133 MHz and now we have 3.2 GHz CPUs).
The graphics card companies are always having to warn people really far ahead what their feature sets are going to be or there won't be any software to take advantage of it.
Scalability has become a really interesting problem nowadays, because the difference between the top end and bottom end has stretched.
It seems like the current generation of game engines (like Source) and the current APIs are going to be fairly stable for the next couple of years. They'll get faster, but you won't see this as fast an evolution in the architectures as we've been seeing, simply because there's so much room left to exploit stuff in the current architectures. Of course a statement like that almost guarantees that two years from now I'll look like a complete idiot, and we'll have entirely abandoned the notion of an independent graphics accelerator because Intel has some whizzy hyperthreading tricks up their sleeves or something.
This may sound a little like a stupid question..
What i don't get, is, when Valve started to work on the HL2 Source engine (when was that exactly btw?) it must've been a long time ago, 1999 for example. So, you had that technologie then already? But, that couldn't be true, because the engine uses DirectX 9 and that's 'just' released. So, i'm totally confused
. There will probably be a simple explanation, but please share it with me.Thanks a lot, hope to hear from you soon!
Mathijs Delva
__________________________________________________
Gabe's answer :
We started work in 1998 when we shipped HL-1. Anytime you are working on something this long, you have to plan pretty far ahead, whether it's DX features or CPU speeds or fill rate or shader depths, or broadband adoption or whatever.
For example CPU price/performance is ahead of where we originally thought it would be (you have to remember that HL-1 had a "minimum" CPU speed of 133 MHz and now we have 3.2 GHz CPUs).
The graphics card companies are always having to warn people really far ahead what their feature sets are going to be or there won't be any software to take advantage of it.
Scalability has become a really interesting problem nowadays, because the difference between the top end and bottom end has stretched.
It seems like the current generation of game engines (like Source) and the current APIs are going to be fairly stable for the next couple of years. They'll get faster, but you won't see this as fast an evolution in the architectures as we've been seeing, simply because there's so much room left to exploit stuff in the current architectures. Of course a statement like that almost guarantees that two years from now I'll look like a complete idiot, and we'll have entirely abandoned the notion of an independent graphics accelerator because Intel has some whizzy hyperthreading tricks up their sleeves or something.
