[Eldorado.Railroad]

From 23 February 2014 - 11:31 AM:

Steve, if you want to compile only PS3, the find all such kind of lines in your .fx:

technique ImagePS2 {
	pass Pass_0 {
		VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VSGeneral(false);
		PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PSImage(false);
	}
}

And replace vs_2_0 and ps_2_0 to vs_3_0 and ps_3_0. Everywhere.

Peter,

I have thought about this, but do we not still have the forced issue of supporting Shader Model 2? I think James would insist that it still be supported. From my point of view, yes I would like to discard Shader Model 2 and if support for WinXP stops, we will certainly be moving beyond Shader Model 3 also. Thanks for showing me just how easy it is to stop runtime compilation of Shader Model 2!

Thanks...!

[Eldorado.Railroad]

James%20Ross, on 23 February 2014 - 11:05 AM, said:

IIRC the only difference in OR currently is that shadow maps only support 1 level (i.e. not casecaded) in SM2, but SM3 supports all 4 levels.

From my experiments your IIRC is correct. Only one shadow map is used for SM2. Thanks for clarifying with Peter, just exactly what is going on in the compilation of the .fx files. I suppose that under certain conditions SM2 is automagically selected at runtime depending on the users hardware. I have been fortunate to be able to force one model over the other in the registry because I have that choice. I wonder offhand just how many users actually use/have to use SM2 in 2014?

Thanks for you help.

[gpz]

Eldorado.Railroad, on 23 February 2014 - 08:20 PM, said:

I have thought about this, but do we not still have the forced issue of supporting Shader Model 2? I think James would insist that it still be supported.

Hey, I didn't mean we will commit this change, it is only for you to get around your compilation problems after your mods. :jawdrop2:

[markus_GE]

Just out of curiousity, having gone into fine-tuning my settings for ORTS once again some time ago... what are the graphical and performance differences between the to shader models? And how would I switch them in the registry? New value-enrty "ShaderModel", with the number as the actual value?

Cheers, Markus

[James Ross]

markus_GE, on 23 February 2014 - 11:51 PM, said:

Just out of curiousity, having gone into fine-tuning my settings for ORTS once again some time ago... what are the graphical and performance differences between the to shader models? And how would I switch them in the registry? New value-enrty "ShaderModel", with the number as the actual value?

Whatever the exact setting is called in the log file, type REG_DWORD, value 2 or 3. It is unlikely to be that useful to you, however, since a) almost everyone will be on SM3 already and :unsure: SM2 only reduces the shadow map code.

There's as little differences as possible between the two, so it likely wont make any performance difference (or not very much) - SM2 code only exists because we support people with really old graphics hardware. I'm not sure if it's even useful in 2014.

[markus_GE]

:unsure: for the explanation, James :D

I´ll give it a go when I get all this mess called FBA (for graduation) done by the end of the week. Will report back what I found, if it is appreciated :)

Cheers, Markus