Benchmarks and video preview of Lost Coast at Bit-tech

[Munky]

The gf6 and 7 series are physically incapable of doing EXR HDR (the way it was done in Farcry, Chaos Theory) with AA enabled. If Valve decided to make HDR work with AA they had to implement it using shaders, and not the FP buffer. And as with other programming, there are a million solutions to the same problem, so they would have written different shaders for Ati/Nv cards, utilizig each card's strenghts to an advantage. Sm3 or not, there are certain operations that the x850 cards do faster than the 6800 cards, so sm3 alone is no guarante that the 6800 cards would run this type of HDR faster or with less of a performance hit. Any other developer that wishes to have HDR and AA at the same time would have to implement it using shaders as well, so again the FP buffer of the gf6/7 would be useless, and it's up to the programmer to decide how to implement it, and how to optimize it for a certain card. Thus again sm3/FP capability turns out to be less useful than originally hyped up to be.