Now, having said all that, game developers are going to use VS, if only because the software only implementation is fast enough on a fast processor, and it gives them plenty of T&L flexibility. They get to do cool lighting effects. It's there. And heck, wasn't it game developers who bitched about not wanting to give up their vertices in the first place? Methinks, yes. It was game developers who said that they didn't trust DirectX to handle their vertices and that they had their own effects and lighting tricks that they wanted to implement. Hence, we get the present state of affairs.

Maybe that's why game publishers like to lock up game developers and hide them from public view.

Get down to the PS, and you have to wonder what the deal is going to be there for something like SmartShader, or Nvidia's 3dfx inspired motion blur features. Frankly, everything that ATI and Nvidia can do, any other DirectX 8.1 card and driver should do as well. Nvidia can claim that it can deliver motion blur in one swoop, and ATI can claim to deliver six texture blend operation in one pass, but then again, what's the motivation for a developer to go that extra distance to support a feature on an ATI or Nvidia card, knowing that it is never going to see the light of phosphors on any other screen?

As far the game developer is concerned, the question is always going to be supporting the widest range of installed cards. In addition, the more programmability that gets put into the GPU the more programming work it is for developers to take advantage of it.

Someone explain to me who is paying for all this stuff? Are you going to be buying $300-500 graphics accelerators for gaming this Christmas? I'm curious.

Are developers, already set up for two major console launches, looking at the sight of a depressed PC market, going to put up resources to get this stuff done?

Things are awfully ambiguous in the world of the 3D Doh. After almost 5 years of hammering developers with the 3D pipeline, and making sure that everyone of them knows their Foley from their van Dam, and their Blinn from their AR Smith, they now have to face the merciless pursuit of figuring out Assembly Language coding for a graphics card.