Thats exactly what I understood.
The difference is that not "all cards" work like that ... mainly those lacking FFP support at all and that are the cards targeted at an API where the FFP does not exist anymore, which is DX10.
DX9.0c cards ie cards up to GF 79XX and the X19XX outperform their successors in DX9 games that are not heavy shader based (-> DX10 graphics programming style in DX9, using fully shader based cores even for basic model transformation etc, which is very demanding and leaves 400 series cards and below in the dust) so to say games that are targeted at DX9, not at DX10 without using the DX10 API.
There are several very good examples of games where even a 7800GT can outperform an overclocked 8800GTX without that much of a problem on WinXP.
So assuming that "all do it like that" only leads to very crappy performance on far too many system and nobody pays for an engine that sucks on the common user machine unless you have an engine for which someone would pay 100k upwards as they can invest money to make it work on other machines. But an indie targeted engine with that attitude is wasted time of its programmer as the potential users might (and most likely will) be distracted by the fact that it needs a semi monster to run at all.
Josh has shown in the past that he has the potential to do great stuff, no question.
But he also shows from time to time that he is more the tech guy with great interest in new interesting technics, which in cases like this is, at least to me, more than a minor problem. Because the stuff thats now new and interesting will need at least 12 months to ripe on the hardware end far enough to work on "medium" to low graphics cards ...
I am not interested in solutions that need one to have at least a medium -> high graphics card to see the "basic stuff". Thats an attitude that not even Valve, Epic or id would survive (crysis shows that it has a serious impact on the sells no mather how good the intends and ideas were, or how good the underlying technology would be)
The difference is that not "all cards" work like that ... mainly those lacking FFP support at all and that are the cards targeted at an API where the FFP does not exist anymore, which is DX10.
DX9.0c cards ie cards up to GF 79XX and the X19XX outperform their successors in DX9 games that are not heavy shader based (-> DX10 graphics programming style in DX9, using fully shader based cores even for basic model transformation etc, which is very demanding and leaves 400 series cards and below in the dust) so to say games that are targeted at DX9, not at DX10 without using the DX10 API.
There are several very good examples of games where even a 7800GT can outperform an overclocked 8800GTX without that much of a problem on WinXP.
So assuming that "all do it like that" only leads to very crappy performance on far too many system and nobody pays for an engine that sucks on the common user machine unless you have an engine for which someone would pay 100k upwards as they can invest money to make it work on other machines. But an indie targeted engine with that attitude is wasted time of its programmer as the potential users might (and most likely will) be distracted by the fact that it needs a semi monster to run at all.
Josh has shown in the past that he has the potential to do great stuff, no question.
But he also shows from time to time that he is more the tech guy with great interest in new interesting technics, which in cases like this is, at least to me, more than a minor problem. Because the stuff thats now new and interesting will need at least 12 months to ripe on the hardware end far enough to work on "medium" to low graphics cards ...
I am not interested in solutions that need one to have at least a medium -> high graphics card to see the "basic stuff". Thats an attitude that not even Valve, Epic or id would survive (crysis shows that it has a serious impact on the sells no mather how good the intends and ideas were, or how good the underlying technology would be)