i’ve heard this, too. but my experience, and those of people i’ve worked with, is that ati’s cg support is fairly poor.
on the other hand, i just assumed that was the problem when the toon shader example failed. when running the (basic) demo, i get a blank screen with this error at the bottom of the window:
"Toon Shader: Video card not powerful enough to do image postprocessing"maybe the bamboo stuff is failing in some other way, but CommonFilters.filters.setCartoonInk() returned false.
the advanced demo, on the other hand, failed in a different way:
:gobj(error): /usr/local/src/panda3d-1.5.4/samples/Cartoon-Shader/lightingGen.sha: (16) : warning C7011: implicit cast from "float4" to "float3"
:gobj(error): /usr/local/src/panda3d-1.5.4/samples/Cartoon-Shader/lightingGen.sha: (16) : warning C7011: implicit cast from "float4" to "float3"
:gobj(error): /usr/local/src/panda3d-1.5.4/samples/Cartoon-Shader/lightingGen.sha: (16) : warning C7011: implicit cast from "float4" to "float3"
:gobj(error): /usr/local/src/panda3d-1.5.4/samples/Cartoon-Shader/lightingGen.sha: (16) : warning C7011: implicit cast from "float4" to "float3"
:gobj(error): /usr/local/src/panda3d-1.5.4/samples/Cartoon-Shader/lightingGen.sha: (29) : fatal error C9999: *** exception during compilation ***
Segmentation faultmany other programs involving shaders fail in various ways. those that explictly load .sha shader files (as opposed to using the new-fangled auto generated ones) pause/load for a long time before posting any of the above errors, and then again before finally segfaulting. there’s no such thing as a software implementation of cg to my knowledge, so i’m not sure what the hangs could be about.
the card is plenty capable (assuming that ati is not the barrier) – its r520 architecture is on par with nvidia’s g70, supporting shader model 3.0, etc. in particular, it’s the x1800 mobile part.
jeremy