Official List of Features and Limitations of the various Pixel Shader versions?

Official List of Features and Limitations of the various Pixel Shader versions?

• SillyMS

  Geometry shaders are one of the things it doesn't have, unfortunately :-)
  
  
  

• afshar

  Probably the biggest difference is in the way Xbox does geometry instancing, which is quite a bit more powerful and flexible than DX9 on Windows.
  
  
  

• andyfraser

  So what are the significant differences between SM 3.0 and Xbox's SM 3.0
  Besides the fact that the xbox doesn't have MRTs and the support for Vertex Texturing, which is not on all PC SM 3.0 cards
  
  
  

• ModelMan

  At the moment the Xbox instancing system is only covered in the native devkit documentation, but we are working on merging that into the XNA help (it needs quite a bit of rework to make sense in isolation from the rest of the native XDK docs). Should be available sometime in the next couple of months.
  
  
  

• Hussain Noordin

  Wow, XBox 360 supports SM3.0
  This is we-just-landed-on-the-moon impact news to me!
  
  

• nils49

  Xbox is actually significantly better than SM 3.0.
  
  
  

• Kira_26

  Wikipedia has a pretty good article on HLSL that should help. Basically, you get more registers/instruction slots with greater versions, allowing you to do more. So some things like tex#dlod aren't available on earlier shader models. MSDN used to have a pretty good HLSL Shader Reference, but I think it's either been taken down or moved, and I can't find it if it's been moved.
  
  Edit: I found this in MSDN2.  Not exactly what you're looking for, but a really good read.
  
  

• Karl Kaiser

  Cool, I'll continue to pray to the XNA Gods for geometry shaders then.
  
  

• rwerner

  Thanks to both of you for replying. I did look at the HLSL reference and programming guide but they don't have a comprehensive list. There are just scattered bits that mention different limitations of different versions. That Wikipedia chart is exactly what is needed... thanks Kyle. However, I really feel that Microsoft should make a similar chart to make it official. Also, the Wikipedia chart doesn't show anything for version 1.x although I suppose there isn't much of a need to support 1.x in games any more.
  

• dumbo

  Worth noting that the Xbox360 XNA is using a custom version of SM3.0 so it has some differences (mainly for the better :) ) than the normal PC SM3.0
  
  Deano
  
  

• LogCale

  Is there any documentation on this

  I almost gave up geometry instancing on PC, since I've read somewhere on nvidia's site that the gain isn't that high when passing a certain number of batches / frame.

  I'll soon get an xbox, so I want to be prepared to use as much of it's power as I can :)

   

  
  

• Nightmare_BE

  The HLSL shader reference and programming guide from the C++ DirectX docs should be able to tell you what you need. Though you might have to dig around a bit.
  
  Cheers,
  Leaf.
  
  
  

• narend

  I've been wanting to do instancing on the xbox. You can't do it like you can on windows because the SetFrequency method is windows only, but if I find a way before the documentation is released I'll post on this thread.
  
  
  
• Official List of Features and Limitations of the various Pixel Shader versions?