AMD Launches Partnership With CAD Developer PTC 75
MojoKid writes "AMD is kicking off its weekend with news of a partnership between itself and CAD software developer PTC (Parametric Technology Corporation). PTC owns and develops the Creo software family. One of the programs at the heart of the company, Creo Element/Pro, was originally known as Pro/ENGINEER. It's not at all unusual for software developers in the CAD/CAM space to ally with hardware manufacturers, but it's typically Nvidia, not AMD, making such announcements. AMD claims that the upcoming Creo 2.0 product suite will be able to take advantage of the GPU in unprecedented ways that simultaneously improve performance and visual quality without compromising either. The company calls one such option Order Independent Transparency, or OIT. OIT is a rendering technology that allows for the partial display of wireframes and models inside a solid surface without creating artifacts or imprecise visualizations."
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Re:OpenGL (Score:4, Funny)
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Implementation.... the CAD companies control the standards body, Khronos, forcing them to make minor incremental upgrades to the OpenGL standard. AMD/Intel/NVIDIA add their own extensions to the standard to utilize their silicon more fully, however they are all different from vendor to vendor. Then gaming engines need to code for three implementations of tessellation, or some other bullshit technology that only games use. Game developers look at this, give up, and develop for Windows/XBox exclusively, becau
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I would agree with you if all Game Developers were also writing their own Graphics Engine. However, most people use an existing Engine which has already implemented all the compatibility bits
Re:OpenGL (Score:5, Insightful)
CAD IS THE REASON LINUX GAMING DOES NOT EXIST.
Absolute nonsense. CAD is the engine that kept OpenGL going through the years of vicious attacks by Microsoft. Even though Microsoft achieved near absolute victory in the gaming space and played an instrumental role in bringing SGI to its knees, it failed to kill OpenGL entirely, in large part because of the entrenched high end CAD market. While most CAD vendors did port their systems from Unix to Windows in the late 90's, they had little interest in porting to Direct3D. Microsoft was therefore prevented from undermining OpenGL on Windows by their usual techniques such as playing games with the driver APIs. During this period, Linux took over Hollywood's render farms from Unix, and that was another base of support for OpenGL, but it might not have been sufficient if Microsoft had ever succeeded in dislodging the tenacious grip of OpenGL on Windows-based CAD. And then there was John Carmack's famous refusal to switch to Direct3D, but that came close to the brink. Not any more.
In my opinion, the greatest threat to OpenGL ever was the noisy faction of game developers pushing for a complete break with compatibility for OpenGL 3.0 (I doubt very much that John Carmack was ever one of those, despite his well founded criticisms). In retrospect it was proved that OpenGL could achieve parity with Direct3D and more, without breaking compatibility. And now OpenGL basically owns the entire gaming universe except for the steadily shrinking part over which Microsoft is able to exercise monopoly control.
Well, and Linux gaming does exist, just not at the level where we can throw away our consoles quite yet. But that day is coming.
One can fairly ask, why is the Linux game market, with millions of potential customers, not already well served by the likes of EA and Activision? I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think you do either. It very definitely has nothing to do with the influence of CAD vendors on OpenGL. I tend to suspect the hidden hand of Microsoft, however I do not have firm evidence of that. And furthermore I don't care, because it is the very failure of the big publishers to serve the Linux market that has accelerated the rise of a vibrant and rapidly growing community of free and open content developers on Linux. I sincerely hope the big publishers continue to keep their heads up their proverbial colons forever, because it does our community nothing but good in the long run.
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I suspect that the lack of Linux games is that no one believes those millions of potential customers actually represent millions of customers.
A significant percentage of Linux users are freedom-only. They are out.
A significant percentage are the older unix-admin turned Linux user. Most of them fall outside the gaming generation.
A significant percentage are the experimental programmer types who are unlikely to have a stable system to target.
So for anything too complex for lowest-common hardware (software ren
Re:OpenGL (Score:4, Insightful)
A significant percentage of Linux users are freedom-only. They are out.
What significant portion is that? I seriously doubt you can find anybody who has never run a proprietary binary on their Linux system. RMS perhaps, but that Is about it (and I would not have it any other way). While it is entirely correct for major Linux distributions to completely ignore or quarantine every bit of binary or non-free, nobody ever said that Linux should be a bad place to run binary distributions. Just ask the Opera folks about that.
A significant percentage are the older unix-admin turned Linux user. Most of them fall outside the gaming generation.
Then I wonder where all those Unix admins are when you try to hire them. I do believe you vastly overestimate the proportion of the Linux community that consists of sysadmins. The Linux developer community, yes, but the Linux user community is orders of magnitude bigger than the Linux developer community.
A significant percentage are the experimental programmer types who are unlikely to have a stable system to target.
I wish. Then we would be even further ahead technology wise. But I seriously doubt you will find any facts to support your claim.
Sorry, I'll have to call your post 100% FUD.
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What significant portion is that? I seriously doubt you can find anybody who has never run a proprietary binary on their Linux system. (...) While it is entirely correct for major Linux distributions to completely ignore or quarantine every bit of binary or non-free, nobody ever said that Linux should be a bad place to run binary distributions. Just ask the Opera folks about that.
True, but it's a long way from pragmatists who have used the nVidia blob or ran Opera into a paying games customer. A person who is 95% vegetarian but will eat meat if he's very hungry or there's not much other food doesn't make him a prime customer for a steak house. And the people who run Linux because it's free as in beer, well they're not likely to be very profitable customers. Most people tend to fall into one of those two categories. If you take away those two things, if you say you could get Windows
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A significant percentage of Linux users are freedom-only. They are out.
As the Humble Indie Bundle have shown, Linux users in general are willing to pay more for software than Windows users. Maybe because they aren't taxed for basic things like operating system and word processing they have more to spend on games?
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And the open source model doesn't really work for games. A 90% working beta program is potentialy useful. A 90% working beta game is something that crashes at the load screen and won't let you properly complete the first quest.
Wrong. A 90% working beta game is one with placeholder textures, stub AI and lots of cheat modes. A game that crashes at the load screen is a broken game, Open Source or not. No self-respecting open source coder would call that "beta".
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Let me be the first to say "huh?"
Desktop OpenGL use has never been as dead as it is now. The only new game to use OpenGL to come out in the last 18 months is id's Rage, and that was a bit of a flop. Looking forward the only game using OpenGL is Doom 4, which is based on the same engine as Rage. No one else is commissioning new projects based on OpenGL. At
You forgot the consoles and WoW- how embarrassing! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Most of the modern gaming consoles can use OpenGL. But the developers don't. Virtually all of the major games are programed in LibGCM, kind-of DirectX, and GX for the PS3, 360, and Wii respectively. And the handhelds don't use OpenGL at all, especially not the DS which is only barely 3D capable in the first place.
When you're working with a fixed platform you can work at a much lower level to maximize your performance. In fact you basically have to. Pure OpenGL is too high level for that.
Also, while it's tru
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"Virtually all of the major games are programed in LibGCM, kind-of DirectX, and GX for the PS3, 360, and Wii respectively. And the handhelds don't use OpenGL at all, especially not the DS which is only barely 3D capable in the first place."
You are conveniently leaving out the massively growing Android and iOS smartphone and tablet market, where OpenGL is the standard 3D graphics engine.
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If you read my original post (the GP), you'll see that I'm not. This sub-thread is about handheld game consoles rather than mobile devices.
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And the handhelds don't use OpenGL at all, especially not the DS which is only barely 3D capable in the first place.
Don't practically all handhelds with a fancy GPU use OpenGL ES?
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And also on MS Windows. Take a look at any forum on running the MS Windows version of WoW under wine and you'll see recommendations to run it in WoW's OpenGL mode instead of the DirectX mode. The command line flag is Wow.exe -opengl FFS - it doesn't get more obvious than that! Now don't try pretending it's anything other than an argument for Wow.exe, instead if you have the software just try launching it that way from a shell on MS Windows
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Blizzard includes the opengl renderer on Windows because it's free, not because it's better. It's not even as good. And they don't support it. Try reporting graphics problems with OpenGL on Windows and they will tell you to stop doing that and to go away.
Are you having an affair with Khronos or something?
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Pure OpenGL is too high? The last time i was working with it (1.1) it was very very low level. Polygon construction, vector lists, state machine, push/pop'ing each translation and rotation. You also had to query for gl extensions to figure out what the hardware was capable of and tailor the rendering.
I'm doubting OpenGL is too high level. It's like the c language for graphics. If anything, it's too low (which is fixed with libraries).
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Actually, it looks like Autodesk is committed to DirectX and/or in-house developed display drivers at this point.
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Wow, Autodesk, the crappiest CAD company of them all. And look, ADSK flat on its back the last five years. Somehow you just know that going to happen to anybody who drinks the Microsoft Koolaid.
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Factually, incorrect.
Desktop OpenGL has never been larger than it is now. How come? Apple. Every copy of OS X sold with Macs adds another OpenGL Desktop to the total. Quarter over Quarter Apple's Desktop Market share is growing.
Try again. Apple chaired the OpenGL 3.3 branch. They also chaired the OpenGL 3.1 branch. Khronos is fully embracing the move to OpenCL (another Apple gift) along with AMD. Nvidia is still kicking an screaming and pushing CU
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And now OpenGL basically owns the entire gaming universe except for the steadily shrinking part over which Microsoft is able to exercise monopoly control.
Well, and Linux gaming does exist, just not at the level where we can throw away our consoles quite yet. But that day is coming.
One can fairly ask, why is the Linux game market, with millions of potential customers, not already well served by the likes of EA and Activision? I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think you do either. It very definitely has nothing to do with the influence of CAD vendors on OpenGL. I tend to suspect the hidden hand of Microsoft, however I do not have firm evidence of that.
I think the main reasons are much simpler (even if I would not trust Microsoft to abstain from meddling):
1) Low market share of Linux on the desktop. That means far fewer potential customers.
2) For fast 3D graphics (which are important to "AAA"games), the driver situation on Linux is still a bit unsatisfactory. You either have to run the binary drivers from the vendor, which have a lousy reputation in case of AMD, or the Open Source drivers which are still inferior in terms of performance (check the benchma
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Maintaining OpenGL compatibility is one thing (that is, the hardware itself runs both old and new), but the language itself, especially graphical shading language (GLSL) made a huge turn at 3.0, making it much more similar to Cg and HLSL and most code that makes use of shaders needs to be rewritten. In my experience, this is a non-trivial rewrite because the code needs to hook into every triangle list and every shader needs to be rewritten if you want to use any new features (which has affected nearly every
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Re:/vertisement. Nothing to see here. (Score:4, Informative)
I will say whomever at AMD killed the Phenom/Athlon lines was an idiot and should get a good firing
BD was Dirk's baby and he was the first to fall on his sword. Personally, I think BD turned out well given the fact that AMD was teetering on the brink of financial collapse for the majority of the design cycle. It won't be much longer before Trinity gives a second look at what the BD core can do in a consumer SKU.
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Trying to remove floating point when damned near every load a consumer has IS floating point heavy? That's just retarded.
I thought the future is having an on-chip GPU core for doing the FP-intensive work? (I know Bulldozer doesn't have one, but will later ones?...)
Blatent slashvertisement, really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow, talk about a blatant slashvertisement. As the summary states, it's not at all unusual for CAD/CAM software to ally with hardware so what exactly is the news for nerds here??
With more contributors working on improving BRL-CAD's usability and features, we'd have an open source alternative without the huge recurring price tag. Lots of ways to get involved are listed here: http://brlcad.org/wiki/Contributor_Quickies [brlcad.org]
You see what I did there.
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And any standard they bring out too. They killed OpenGL 3, by bring in a lot of unnecessary changes. Pretty much everyone ignored OpenGL 3, and directly adopted OpenGL 4.
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PTC sells one of the most widely used 3D parametric engineering software on the market and have not partnered with a specific hardware vendor since the early 90s. This is news.
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Wow, talk about a blatant slashvertisement. As the summary states, it's not at all unusual for CAD/CAM software to ally with hardware so what exactly is the news for nerds here??
Speak for yourself. For me, this is interesting news that I want to know and would not have otherwise heard about.
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I never purported to speak for anyone else. My point was as stated -- that this isn't really geek nerd news. It's very much par for the course within the CAD industry. Hell, it's par for most big-industry fields these days, especially graphics-related ones.
The fact that Pro/E is jumping on a bandwagon says more about the wagon than the band. Understandably will be interesting to some people, but then so is the kid-got-shot-in-florida topic and it misses the target just as much.
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Actually, I prefer big endian. Thanks.
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Let's see. AMD, CAD, Pro/ENGINEER, GPU, wireframe rendering... Yup, pretty much spot-on geek nerd news. Or do you think the non-geek world would actually find this interesting?
Geek nerd topics, sure. Just not newsworthy. No more newsworthy than it would be to announce that Linux runs on AMD64. It's expectedbecause it's the smart thing to do. Pro/E is just behind the curve on this one. Most of the other CAD companies are already in bed with hardware optimizations. Still doesn't make it newsworthy though (did I miss a free Linux port or something? conversion to open source? those would be news!).
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I never purported to speak for anyone else. My point was as stated -- that this isn't really geek nerd news.
Understandably will be interesting to some people,
Geek nerd topics, sure. Just not newsworthy.
This isn't news to you. It is interesting and newsworthy to me, and apparently, to some other people as well. [slashdot.org] But you replied to that post, apparently not quite comprehending it. I reiterate what he said:
Speak for yourself. For me, this is interesting news that I want to know and would not have otherwise heard about.
I agree with him completely. If you're not interested in this article, why don't you read and comment in another thread, one which you find interesting and newsworthy, instead of trying to convince us that this one isn't so.
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This isn't news to you. It is interesting and newsworthy to me[snip]
I would think that goes without saying; of course I only speak for myself. Defensive much? Shill? Trolling? I'll bite. I was commenting on how I perceive it (frankly as a paid-for posting) given the article's lack of content. Everyone's entitled to an opinion and fortunately we don't even have to agree on that point.
I agree with him completely. If you're not interested in this article, why don't you read and comment in another thread, one which you find interesting and newsworthy, instead of trying to convince us that this one isn't so.
Great, more power to you. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, contrary to your claim, but just replying to a thread I started. If it bothers you that much, you're just as welcome
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Apparently, other geeks/nerds find this article worthwhile. They're idiots or ignorant at best. :)
As you note, posters feeling otherwise is completely subjective (as is my view) and serves no basis of demonstrating right or wrong. It's purely anecdotal. As for why I respond, this is just an entertaining discussion on a topic I live, work, and breathe. Of course, I'll keep engaging in the discussion I started as long as I find it interesting to do so. I do not, however, see it as an argument or debate wh
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Apparently, other geeks/nerds find this article worthwhile. They're idiots or ignorant at best. :)
Ah yes, the old "their opinion differs from mine, therefore they must be stupid" line. Ok, you win. You're the smartest, rightest, bestest, geekest nerd on Slashdot. Your mother must be so proud. Have a cookie.</sarcasm>
This non-conversation is going nowhere, which usually happens when one of the participants is incapable of self-criticism and has a need to impose his worldview on others to validate his fragile ego and sense of self worth. Here's a tip. It's actually ok to be wrong sometimes, and it's
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No more newsworthy than it would be to announce that Linux runs on AMD64.
Don't be an ass. Linux on AMD64 was huge news, especially as it was years before Microsoft and helped cement AMD's instruction set as the standard.
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No more newsworthy than it would be to announce that Linux runs on AMD64.
Don't be an ass. Linux on AMD64 was huge news, especially as it was years before Microsoft and helped cement AMD's instruction set as the standard.
How's that being an ass? It was huge news. It wouldn't be if it were a headline posted today. We'd be asking what took so long, what were they waiting for. Adopting it after all your competitors doesn't make for news. It makes for shaking a little "me too" rattle. Good for PTC, but good grief. I expect more from billion dollar companies, which is what makes open source development all that more interesting a topic.
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What's your agenda?
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what would be really good news is PRO/E running on native linux on AMD64!
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what's amazing is that they don't z-sort the stuff before drawing on cards which don't support this new tech. I suspect that it does it in the drivers.. ONLY ON SELECTED CARDS. it's a fucking ripoff and the rendering pipeline of their cad program seems to be teh suck?
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That is a little cool actually, at least from a technical perspective. Z-sorting in code sucks big time. But yeah, it also sucks requiring specific hardware, the absolute latest drivers just to run, and without any backwards or hardware compatibility support. For the cost, they should be giving out free back rubs.
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Wow, talk about a blatant slashvertisement. As the summary states, it's not at all unusual for CAD/CAM software to ally with hardware so what exactly is the news for nerds here??
This particular slashvertisement is designed to make ATI owners feel good about their purchase because their hardware will finally accelerate something other than a game, even though they'll never actually run it.
Pro Engineer UI (Score:1)
Now if PTC would invest in a more intuitive UI...
I would nominate Pro/E 5 (last version before Creo) as worst UI ever.
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As a Product Designer that has used Pro for 12 years now I couldn't agree with you more. Fucking marketing pukes decide that MS ribbon interface is the FUTURE & they take Wildfire 4.0 (which is one of the BEST UIs in CAD) & move all the commands haphazardly to the ribbon. What is really funny is the pukes renamed Wildfire 5.0 Creo 1.0! I've heard Creo 2.0 is much better but we shall see.
IMO Marketing pukes are the bane of all tech based businesses.
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does pro/e have a script-able cmd line? That is something i've always liked about autocad, and missed when I moved to solidoworks (just about the only thing I missed).
ah those were the days... (Score:2)
And it wasn't just us, it seemed they'd f*cked lots of businesses. At least the mid-sized ones I knew of. But no one wanted to admit they'd been had, or sue them.
I'm sure PTC is better now, and the sales people never lie to anyone. Why look, they even changed the name of t
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well if your dumb enough to ask such a vague question and base your purchase on a 6 word response then you got what you wanted didn't you?
sheet metal? what material, thickness and quality? You were too stupid to ask the correct question(s), and somehow its not your fault, what was your companies name? just so I can be sure to avoid any mystical hand magic powers of engineering ...
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Somehow I think you're confusing the off-hand relation of a situation with actual testimony of the lie.
The sales pitches were more involved, but you don't need to hear them to get the sentiment.
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well if your dumb enough to ask such a vague question and base your purchase on a 6 word response then you got what you wanted didn't you?
You honestly believe the decision was made like that? And who said I made it?
sheet metal? what material, thickness and quality?
Duh, all and any.
You were too stupid to ask the correct question(s), and somehow its not your fault, what was your companies name? just so I can be sure to avoid any mystical hand magic powers of engineering ...
What is your problem? If you're going to troll at least do it as an anonymous coward.
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sheet metal? what material, thickness and quality?
Duh, all and any.
so everything from the foil wrap on the satilites, to 3/4" plate then? from steel to Ti to Inconel right? see your "all and any" is a bit broad don't you think?
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sheet metal? what material, thickness and quality?
Duh, all and any.
so everything from the foil wrap on the satilites, to 3/4" plate then? from steel to Ti to Inconel right? see your "all and any" is a bit broad don't you think?
You're attempting to engage in a discussion on a subject you obviously know nothing about. It makes you look stupid.
And now I look stupid, too, for responding to a troll's sock puppet.
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Same ProE (Score:4, Interesting)
Same ProE that dropped Linux support out of the blue (but kept Solaris, so it's not a matter of development effort, Unix or platform popularity)?
gg assholes!
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Personal Use License gone? (Score:1)
Before they changed the name ("Creo"? Really?) away from the extremely well established Pro/ENGINEER branding, they had a personal use license for $250. I just came up with a use for it (interesting timing for this announcement), and now I don't see this option available.
I did find the student license, but I'm not a student and the requirements are quite clear and specific - and I don't meet them.
I also found the Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express for free (up to 60 parts, which suits my needs), but this
OIT isn't that new. (Score:4, Interesting)
Note: I'm no expert in this area, this is just some stuff I have picked up along with a basic understanding of how these techniques are employed. There may be inaccuracies or incomplete information, corrections welcome.
OIT is one area that modern graphics hardware really struggles with - A software render can just go ahead and allocate memory dynamically to keep track of the depth value and the colour of each fragment that contributes to a pixel's final colour in a list, but on a 'traditional' GPU, the big problem is that you have no easy way to store anything more than a single 'current' colour per pixel that will get irreversibly blended or overwritten by fragments with a lower depth value, and even if you could keep a list of them, you have no associated depth values, and nor do you have a simple way to sort them on the GPU. However, there is some clever trickery detailed below:
Realtime OIT has been researched and published on (notably by Nvidia and Microsoft) for over a decade.
Heres the basic technique - 'Depth Peeling', from 2001:
http://developer.nvidia.com/system/files/akamai/gamedev/docs/order_independent_transparency.pdf?download=1
Depth peeling renders the scene multiple times with successive layers of transparent geometry removed, front to back, to build up an ordered set of buffers which can be combined to give a final pixel value.
This technique has severe performance penalties, but the alternative (z-sort all transparent polygons every frame) is much, much worse.
'Dual Depth Peeling' - from 2008:
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10.5/opengl/src/dual_depth_peeling/doc/DualDepthPeeling.pdf
This works in much the same way, but is able to store samples from multiple layers of geometry each rendering pass ,using MRT (multiple render targets), and a shader-based sort on the contents of the buffers, speeding the technique up a lot.
Refinements to the DDP technique, cutting out another pass - from 2010:
http://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/gamedev/files/sdk/11/ConstantMemoryOIT.pdf
Reverse depth peeling was developed where memory was at a premium - which extracts the layers back-to-front for immediate blending into an output buffer instead of extracting, sorting and blending, and it is also possible to abuse the hardware used for antialiasing to store multiple samples per output pixel.
Depth peeling really only works well for a few layers of transparent objects, unless you can afford a lot of passes per pixel, but in many situations, it is unlikely that the contribution of transparent surfaces behind the first 4 or so transparent surfaces means much in terms of visual quality.
AMDs 'new' approach involves implementing a full linked-list style A-buffer and a separate sorting pass using the GPU - this has only been possible with pretty recent hardware, and I guess is 'the right way' to do OIT, very much the same as a software renderer on a CPU would do it.
Heres some discussion and implementation of these techniques:
http://www.yakiimo3d.com/2010/07/19/dx11-order-independent-transparency/
This really isn't anything new, single-pass OIT using CUDA for fragment accumulation and sort was presented at Siggraph 2009 - nor is it something PTS can claim as their own. Its possible AMDs FirePros have special support for A-buffer creation and sorting, which is why they run fast, and AMD in general has a pretty big advantage in raw GPGPU speed for many operations (let down by their awful driver support on non-windows platforms, of course) - but really any GPU that has the ability to define and access custom-structured buffers will be able to perform this kind of task, and given NVidia's long history researching and publishing on this subject, its pretty laughable that AMD and PTS can claim it is their new hotness.
Personal use license gone? (Score:3)
(I just realized I accidentally posted A/C last night... reposting while logged in)
Before they changed the name ("Creo"? Really?) away from the extremely well established Pro/ENGINEER branding, they had a personal use license for $250. I just came up with a use for it (interesting timing for this announcement), and now I don't see this option available.
I did find the student license, but I'm not a student and the requirements are quite clear and specific - and I don't meet them.
I also found the Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express for free (up to 60 parts, which suits my needs), but this doesn't appear to be the same software. Does anyone know if this still has the "sketcher" to rough draft the profile of the 3D parts? (I'll have to build a MS machine to even test it out - doubt it runs in Wine).
Granted, the last time I used Pro/E was ~1994 (on Solaris) and the UI has changed dramatically at least twice since then, so I'll have to re-learn it anyways.
I actually liked the original UI... when they changed it to meet Microsoft's requirements (when they first offered it on MS windows), I thought it was a horrible turn to an inefficient design. Don't get me wrong, I understand the reasoning (make it "familiar" to windows users), but the change made it much less efficient to use even though the learning curve was shallower.
Yes, I agree with other postings, it's a shame they dropped Linux support.
I just googled "3d cad linux" and the top advertisement is titled "3D CAD Linux - Flexible, Easy-To-Use Application | PTC.com" with a link to www.ptc.com/Free-Download, which leads you to download 2 options, 32bit and 64bit windows software. That's kind of a dirty advert method for a company as well established as PTC...