3 Apr
2006
3 Apr
'06
9:46 a.m.
In article <Pine.SUN.4.20.0604031040570.3983-100000 at osfn.org>,
William Donzelli <aw288 at osfn.org> writes:
These days, assembly language programming is like
cannibalism - lots of
people insist that it is still very much alive, but nobody has actually
ever seen it.
It had a brief resurgance in programmable graphics pipelines because
the first couple generations of GPUs had such low instruction counts
(8 instructions per pixel, for instance) that it didn't make any sense
to write code in a high-level language. Now that the GPU instruction
counts have gone up (hundreds or thousands of instructions per pixel),
it has pretty much gone to high level shader languages. However, game
programmers stay versed in assembly shaders because they still have to
support those early generations of GPUs.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ:
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/>
Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty
<http://pilgrimage.scene.org>