Short (Driver) Update
Just a brief update today. I am trying out a new driver from laptopvideo2go.com to see if I can get hardware acceleration for some of my d3d11 work. I am typically averse to trying drivers that aren't from my manufacturer on laptops, but I have a 8600M GT on my development laptop which is capable of running the hardware versions of CS4.0. Dell simply refuses to update their drivers with any kind of frequency, so I figured it would be worth it to try running at something faster than 0.5 FPS!
The driver version is 185.81, and I simply followed the directions on the laptopvideo2go website. Sure enough, right after installing it I can run the SDK D3D11 samples that allow CS4.0 shaders! That was quite a speedup - from ~1 FPS to ~140 FPS without changing a single line of code [grin]!
My next task is to try to update my NSE Solver to run in hardware. Some great suggestions from FReY a few posts ago should go a long way towards getting the code ported to CS4.0 compatible format, so we'll see how it turns out. The article write up is also coming along nicely...
Hieroglyph D3D11 Renderer
With my thesis humming right along (I'm still on target to finish up by the end of the month!) I took a little time to continue working on my D3D11 renderer. I'm in the process of having all of the constant buffers for a given shader to update with its internal variables automatically. This is basically making use of the shader reflection code that I already have implemented, and links each part of a constant buffer to a 'parameter' object stored in the renderer.
This allows me to declare a parameter object of various types (i.e. vectors, matrices, shader resource views, or unordered access views) with a given unique name. Then when the shader is bound to the pipeline, the constant buffers loop through their variable lists and grab the parameter values and update the buffer contents. It still needs some work, but things are moving along smoothly so far. Hopefully the system will be wrapped up soon with some visual results to post with...
