FAQs

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Byron Nelson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:11:32 GMT

Speewave:

Also about the OLD HLSL Compiler, is there way we can insert this newer ones in the tool chain?

Search the forums with the relevant keywords (?? HLSL compiler old new ... etc..) in the advanced search, but specify posts by Jwatte. I recall that he has a post somewhere (more than 6 months ago I'd suspect) with the code to make VS use the latest FXC compiler.

Best,
Byron

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Speewave — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:20:56 GMT

You must have a DX 7 Card or something, Windows has DirectX 9.0c w/ Support for 3.0, but your GPU doesn't necessarily support this! If it's not a laptop, run out and buy a new GPU, Budget = Geforce 8600\Radeon HD 3850 (by budget, i mean lowest possible price for this power!

Intel Cards are not in any shape to support XNA, there are a select few that do, but if you have an Intel or a Low-End GPU Purchase Geforce 8600\Radeon HD 3850 also GeForce 4MX\GO Series are not for XNA Either!

Also about the OLD HLSL Compiler, is there way we can insert this newer ones in the tool chain?

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Mai — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:35:21 GMT

I HAVE A PROBLEM I download the source code of one of the tutorial when i run it.it give me this message
NO suitable graphics card found
could/'t find a Direct3d device that has a direct3d 9 level driver and supports pixel shader 1.1 or grater

i read this article and i open DXDIAG
and this the information of my graphics card

Directx verion 9.0c(4.09.0000.0904)
manufacturer intel corporation
DDI version 9(or higher)

when i go the specifc link of the shader it said that if direct x 9.0c soo it has shader 3.0 and it's newer than 1.1
plz tell me why this happend with me

i install 1)visual studio 2008 express eddition
2)xna game studio 3.1
3)Direct x 9.0 web setup for runtime

what am i missing ?what must i extra download? and about my grafics card what should i do?

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

claudy27 — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:53:45 GMT

jwatte:
As long as the target for XNA is to aim for development parity between the Xbox 360 and Windows, there won't be DX10 support in XNA, because the Xbox 360 doesn't do DX10. In fact, for various ~~stupid~~ legacy reasons, XNA is still using the very old DX9 HLSL compiler that doesn't even know how to properly do branched loops, whereas it uses a somewhat better HLSL compiler on Xbox.

So, Windows people can't do DX10 on XNA, and Xbox people can't do fp10 pixel formats on Xbox (plus a bunch of other esoteric things the Xbox can do if you get down and dirty with the hardware). That's the cost of the cross-development niceness that we do get with XNA.

I would be willing to bet that the Xbox 3.0 (the 360 being the Xbox 2.0) will have DX11 (although by that time, we might be at DX12.....), but hey Windows 7 has DX11

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Jonathan Archer — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:06:02 GMT

Thanks a lot for your interesting answer. Without the wish to spam this FAQ thread (also it surely belongs here, too), is there any documentation about this fact? I would need it for my diploma thesis. I think my professor would like that. ;)

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

jwatte — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:26:48 GMT

As long as the target for XNA is to aim for development parity between the Xbox 360 and Windows, there won't be DX10 support in XNA, because the Xbox 360 doesn't do DX10. In fact, for various ~~stupid~~ legacy reasons, XNA is still using the very old DX9 HLSL compiler that doesn't even know how to properly do branched loops, whereas it uses a somewhat better HLSL compiler on Xbox.

So, Windows people can't do DX10 on XNA, and Xbox people can't do fp10 pixel formats on Xbox (plus a bunch of other esoteric things the Xbox can do if you get down and dirty with the hardware). That's the cost of the cross-development niceness that we do get with XNA.

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Jonathan Archer — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:43:54 GMT

Hi there!

Jim Perry:

XNA Game Studio (Express) 1.0, 1.0 Refresh and 2.0 require a DirectX 9 graphics card capable of Shader Model 1.1. ... snip

It would be cool, if you could update the post concerning XNA 3.0 and 3.1. Especially I would be interessted, whether XNA 3.0/3.1 support anything for DX10?!

Thanks a lot in adavance!

Greetings from a beginner

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

jwatte — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:32:40 GMT

reedake2:
jwatte, you mentioned that one of the things that the 360 gets at low cost due to massive fill rate is "multiple passes of render targets". Do you mean having a HLSL technique with 2 or more passes in it?

No; I mean that if you do full-screen effects like blurring etc, that will typically run pretty fast on the Xbox, because the framebuffer write and blend operations are "free." Note that the texture read operations aren't free, though -- and, in fact, are more like a GeForce 9400M in performance. You can in many ways consider the Xbox like a device that's a lot like a GeForce 9400M with DDR-3 memory, but with the fill rate of three SLI GTX 295 cards...

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Pasofec — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:47:18 GMT

Jim Perry:
The newest drivers might be crappy. :) I would recommend installed the next to the newest drivers and see what happens. I've seen this more than once.

Hi Jim. Thanks for really quick answer. I tried to instal older drivers (9.3 and 8.12). And problem is still there. Everything is fine, just XNA games doesn't works good. But not all XNA stuff. Easy stuff is ok. I absolutly don't get where is my problem. Don't you have any other advice? ;-). Maybe go to the shop and buy another card :-P.

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Jim Perry — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:58:19 GMT

The newest drivers might be crappy. :) I would recommend installed the next to the newest drivers and see what happens. I've seen this more than once.

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Pasofec — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:42:40 GMT

Hello Guys! I need help please. I just bought new graphic card. It is ATI Radeon 4830. Uninstaled my very very old nvidia card. Instaled newest drivers. Everything (including 3D games) works great, but my XNA games are very slow(1FPS). I am sending there not-buffered 60k vertices to card, but on my super old card was no lags... Do you have any idea? Thanks for any help Michal

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

reedake2 — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:48:15 GMT

jwatte, you mentioned that one of the things that the 360 gets at low cost due to massive fill rate is "multiple passes of render targets". Do you mean having a HLSL technique with 2 or more passes in it? I would have thought that each pass would need to do all the vertex shader, pixel shader and texture fetch stuff all over again so it would still be bottlenecked as normal. I've probably misunderstood you but I can't think of any kinds of "passes" (except for clearing the screen) that would involve at least texture fetching...

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

jwatte — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:43:39 GMT

Where do you get these specific stats from?

I mostly follow the interwebs, and have done so for twenty-five years. (Yes, there was an internet in 1984!) When the Xbox 360 and PS/3 were in the throes of shipping, the marketing departments published a bunch of specs on the various hardware; you can probably still find it if you Google around a bit.

It's almost impossible to match the Xbox 360 in raw fill rate on the PC, but given that it's often limited on pixel shaders and texture fetch, a Radeon 4850 or GeForce 9800 is probably a good estimate. If you want to compare shader power, you're probably better off with something like a GeForce 9600 GS. If you want to test fill rate specifically, you can get three GeForce 295 GTX++ overclocked cards and run them in SLI on a 3-way PCI-Ex motherboard, I guess :-/ However, you would have ridiculously too much shader and texture power compared to the Xbox at that point.

To test for sure, though, you need an Xbox 360. Luckily, an Xbox with hard drive, plus CC club for a year, plus Live! membership for a year, plus cheap 16:9 LCD display, doesn't cost more than one of those GTX 295 cards :-)

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

Matthew Doucette — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:44:53 GMT

jwatte, your last post shows how stats can be so misleading (without the details). Where do you get these specific stats from?

To make sure you have a graphics card that surpasses the Xbox 360 in every way, what would you recommend? We are pushing the fill rate of our PC graphics card to its limits (the 8GB/s graphics card memory bandwidth PC's that is), but the slowdown on our Xbox from additional sprites is probably due to processing limitations more that rendering. So it's hard to tell what fill rate we are pushing!

Re: How to make sure your graphics card is XNA ready

jwatte — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:18:14 GMT

that's over 3x as fast as the Xbox

Careful! The Xbox has about 21 GB/s of texture read and vertex read and CPU processing combined, but it has about 250 GB/s of fill rate support, which means things like 4x AA is pretty much free, and multiple passes of render targets are fairly inexpensive. Meanwhile, that 4850 has 63 GB/s that is shared between vertex read, texture read and fill rate (but not CPU processing). It's really hard to actually match the Xbox well on a PC, because the balance is so different. The PS/3 is more normal, with about 25 GB/s of graphics throughput, and 22 GB/s of separate CPU throughput, but it also has some SPU/DMA circuitry and other ways of going between the two banks, too.