max 10 ?

[jacksc02]

try that on something slightly more complex than an sphere and plane, and you'll tell me.
I did on a Ivy mesh, it slowed to a crawl the entire max interface.
and the material was a simple standard with a slight highlight.

It's quicker to render a ppt crop.

sounds like a graphics card issues lele!

[^Lele^]

standard 7900, no OC, 256 megs.
Latest release drivers.

Everything else works a marvel, including max 9.
No issue at all (bar some due oddity with gpu shadows), some slight improvement for wire-shading in 2008.

[instinct]

i found wireshading boosting a lot here (7950GX2). Actually it is now faster then smoothshaded here. Used to be the other way round.

Regards,
Thorsten

[Nixon]

mmm

Can any of you guys that tested 2008 tell what's your OS and which display driver you're using?

I would like to see if there's any difference with Vista and Directx10 than XP64 and Directx 9, which I'm currently using?

[instinct]

I am running XP Pro x64 DX9 here

Kind Regards,
Thorsten

[tammo]

x64, directx9 on nvidia 8800

for all the new viewport features you need DX9 and a SM3 supporting card
SM2 cards will get some degradation but work too....
there is a button in the shader editor where you set the display to texture mode, if you press and hold it will give you a second option of having hardware directx based shader by compiling your actual shader in a directX one. it loads then the shader and caches the geometry then it works just fine. the only drawback was that it has to cache the geometry on the graphics board memory and it takes a few seconds to load the geometry and to convert your shader into a directx one.

[dlparisi]

Am I missing something or does this not work on VrayMtl's?

[vlado]

Nope, it does not work with VRayMtl materials at present. This would require us to write a DirectX shader to match the V-Ray material, which we have not done yet.

Best regards,
Vlado

[DaForce]

"yet"

I like the sound of that

[dlparisi]

That's what I thought, it's just that tammo implied that's it's universal which is not the case. And "yet" sounds good to me too!

[vlado]

Well, it depends... while we can produce a DirectX shader for the V-Ray materials, there would be a problem of integrating textures like falloffs etc properly. Internally 3ds Max uses mental mill to compile the materials into DirectX shaders; I'm not sure if/how this is exposed to 3rd party developers, but I'll know soon enough.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

Looks like it's possible... mental mill is used probably only for the mental ray materials; looks like the standard materials are plain directX.

Best regards,
Vlado

[trixian]

So this means proper display of all vray related mats?
Any possibility for a lens pixel shader matching the physical camera's distortion?

[vlado]

Well, this is not currently possible without writing a completely new viewport driver for 3ds Max.

On the other hand, we would prefer to work on an interactive render preview, which shows everything as it would appear exactly in the final rendering, rather than a crippled viewport approximation.

Best regards,
Vlado

[dbuchhofer]

and when you start getting into building a 'generic' hlsl shader that would cover a lot of bases it can get pretty slow. the main problem is you will have a lot of issues with dealing with multiple lights. Its possible to build shaders that will work off of say the nearest two/three lights in the scene etc, but when you start getting into light attenuations, self shadowing, etc. and all the 'basic' shit that vray covers, its just not really feasible without some rediculously heavy work/computation.

its fun stuff though, I've been working with hlsl for a while in another app definitely a way to learn to appreciate all the huge amount of knowledge and work that vlado puts into the renderer