It's really fucked up to think that to draw a quad one has to has to create vertex buffer resource, an "input layout" and whatnot.

It's lame but I must do it, but it's really lame !

Fack those ill conceived abortions (oxymoron ?).. started with Direct3D 1.0

Everyday I see the design mistakes I make when I write any code.. and then I think that it's the same mistakes that every programmer does.. only that most of us have to deal with the bullshit of few.

Direct3D 10 is bullshit... and so is Vista.. but that's nothing new 8)

Oh and by the way, I managed to work around the nVidia driver crash bug in Vista... all I had to do was to scale down the geometry 8)
I had position values going beyond 160000.0f, I scaled down to 50000.0f and the crash is gone.

Pretty fucked up 8)

UPDATE: It turns out that the problem arises with the size of the object relative to the far plane. I guess it's basically a far plane clipping issue.
In fact I had the driver crash again when pulling closer the far clipping plane on a scene that would work fine before.
So there you have it, now fix that driver, please !

Friday I got to test a new model that I'll have to use for my current project.
The unoptimized model had over 1M polys (it's a small one 8). I went on to display it with the DX10-based engine and it crashed the (NVidia) driver.
The model is actually composed of many smaller models, so it's not like there is a huge vertex buffer. It also had no textures and I was using a simple common shader.
The only issue I can think of is the range of coordinates which it's relatively very large. It's a laughable supposition, but everything points to that. I'll have to debug to find a workaround.. but it's not easy considering that those driver crashes force me to reboot almost every time ! (Vista stays up, but I can't do 3D anymore).
This is a really bad setback. For the test I eventually displayed the model with my ultra-basic software renderer... no crashes there ;) ..and if there were, I could have fixed them myself.

Another thing that bothers me about DX10 and drivers in general, is how one has to guess performance, because the internals are obscure.
For example, using an NVidia 8800, I noticed that performance is a lot worse when using buffers flagged as "dynamic".
This whole "static" vs "dynamic" thing is apparently part of DX10 and Vista's driver model. Somebody, somewhere, probably decides to put the buffer in system memory (as opposed to GPU memory) under the assumption that the buffer needs to be touched frequently. Only, I may want to change it rarely, and also I was sort of expecting for the buffer to be allocated directly in the GPU memory and only be mirrored in system memory if I ever tried to read from the buffer (which I wouldn't dare to).

So, I have to be really careful and only use the "dynamic" flag for things that change frequently.. and possibly forget about building a flexible system that uploads textures and geometry on-demand.. which is otherwise theoretically very possible with no (not much ?) performance degradation.
As it stands, it seems almost that dynamic buffers are being uploaded per-frame, regardless of the fact that they aren't being modified per-frame.
..this is all speculation of course.. but that's what I really don't like about this: having to spend time trying to guess what those drivers do behind my back.. and hope that different drivers on different card will behave similarly (crashes aside ;).

For this reason I hope that the time will come when game companies can write complete graphics pipelines again. Either in-house or licensing code, but staying away from closed-source drivers, so that one won't have to debug and profile in the dark.

Some are worried that they couldn't possibly do much better than what card manufacturers already do with those drivers.. I think that there is plenty to improve by just getting rid of those fat drivers that have been plaguing PCs ever since 3D cards came out.

ole'

It looks like NVidia drivers are famous for crashing Vista.
I can believe that, considering all those Blue Screens Of Death I've been getting.
Also I think I can regularly get NVidia drivers to crash and stop providing 3D rendering until I reboot. Specifically very large polygons seem to be a cause of those crashes... ..umm perhaps some faulty clipping ;)  read more »

Since I came back from Arizona I've been quite busy. I've been going to sleep regularly at 4AM and waking up at about 8:40 in the morning. Busy at work but also busy at home, doing "the thing" with the computer.
Fiddling around.. watch a movie, fix a script and time flies.

Today I installed Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It took about 1 hour. All I had to do was starting it, no request for security codes, no crashes nor burns.
Mac OS X doesn't blow my mind, it's just generally nicer than Windows though admittedly at home I spend most of the time with Firefox 8P

It seems however that at work I'll have to install Vista pretty soon to run DirectX.. I mean, Direct3D, 10. Of DirectX, Microsoft only left Direct3D alive and now would like people to use the Direct3D name, but it just isn't going to work.
I generally don't like the idea of installing Vista because I think it's simply useless. Apple is constantly pulling out great hardware and great software while Microsoft is generally lagging behind.
The only recent Microsoft success I can remember of is the XBox 360 (though still behind Nintendo). Other than that, Microsoft's big business is based on good timing from 20 years ago.

I hate the idea that I need to install Vista just to use DirectX 10, that's so unfair and it's possibly the only reason why anyone would install Vista.

Hastalla la Vista
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

So, I got a new notebook... Acer Aspire 5580. A nice piece of hardware with Core 2 Duo, GeForce 7300 and 2GB of RAM. Not too bad, considering that I need to use M$ Office :)
So HW is nice, but I could not find ANY notebook that I could buy with Windows XP. I just had to get one with Vista and this already scared me at the beginning. Every shop was showing me how good is Vista, that it can play DVD and also run videoconferencing AT THE SAME TIME!!! :)
Anyway... I am disappointed. Vista gives me nothing that XP was not giving me, but gives me headache.. HW is good enough but the system (bare and clean!) is constantly messing with HDD even being idle and with 2GB of RAM. IE7 crashed on me a few times... so replaced it with Firefox.  read more »

For a few days I have been running Linux on my machine at work. More because my laptop is gone and I was forced to use different computer. Anyway, Linux is not the way to go, but I wanted to talk about something else. Just because I do not like Linux and this machine can be reinstalled I was thinking about giving Vista a try. Finally sooner or later we all will have to switch to Vista. Because I do not have license to do it I was going to look at some websites to see how can I pirate it so I could test it. Finally I understood that you can try Vista for 30 days and then you need to activate it or it's features will be fading away. So I will go this way, but there is more to that...  read more »