i took a look at the GooBall demo today, and thus is the source of my confusion…
i thought that…
1- a macMini (G4 ppc 1.2 version) had a radeon 9200 graphics card in it that wouldn’t show shaders…
2- when i ran the Avert Fate demo, no shaders would appear, regardless of how i set the quality…
3- when i ran the GooBall demo, and set the quality to beautiful or fantastic… i saw a shadered water in the intro, or at least what appeared to be shadered water… and reflections and refractions… and what more, the game ran at a decent speed…
i thought that my hardware was not shader capable, and that Unity would fallback to the lesser graphics that i saw when i reran the game at simple quality settings…
can someone set me straight on this… am i the victim of some sort of cubemapped optical illusions here… am i seeing what i want to see, or what…
specifically, i’d like to know… if i license the pro version, will i be able to take advantage of shadered water and reflections (it appears so) on an older (g4 radeon 9200) macMini…
thanks for the help… i placing $5 in the jar at the end of the desk…
Radeon 9200 is a reused Radeon 8500.
These cards are DX 8.1 compliant (Shader Model 1.x)
I don’t think you are seeing reflection with that one. But you can fake reflection pretty well without higher end shader, there are DX7 games having water with refraction and reflection (DX7 has no shaders at all!)
According to the graphics card emulation in Unity, Radeon 8500 will do rendertexture reflections. Not reflection+refraction at the same time though. Also it looks somewhat different, like it’s not doing the fresnel or something, but it does work. Here, have a look at the specs…“Full support for DirectX ® 8.1 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware”…
some shaders work on the Radeon 8500-9200. Not all, but many do (e.g. bumpmapping).
Using ShaderLab, it is possible (although somewhat cumbersome) to create shaders for this card. They have to be written using a semi-weird assembly format.
thx guys for the quick and straight forward replys… i had some time to to actually start looking at the Unity demo in depth…
so far i’m quite impressed with the performance and functionality of it… in a few minutes after opening up the app i was able to basically find out some of what i’ve been bugging you all about…
a shot of my favorite test texture laid out on a cube with a normalmap added, and a flashlight (spot) parented to the istperson cam…
for an out of date radeon 9200, this doesn’t look half bad… the bumpmapping shader works fine… plus i did manage to get what sorta looks like a watery surface…
now to concentrate and go through a few tuts to get an idea of what i actually did… and what else can be done with the indie version…
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