Do you see any future developments with these types of post processing effects?

Roger/Maurice - Right now we’re happy with the functionally we've exposed. There is some future work we could do like improving the error logs or adding more functionally, but we have no plans for such work. So unless there is a great response to this feature and demand for improving it, we see no future developments on ATI's end. We both would like to see some cool shaders designed by people outside ATI though.

Can you outline what the SMARTSHADER effects plug-in tool is about and what you'd like to see emerge.

We seem to have answered two different questions here- one about the pssControl tool and one about the whole programmable SMARTSHADER plugin idea. We're not sure what the actual question is, so we'll answer both.

Maurice - All the pssControl tool does is set registry settings that our OpenGL driver looks for. The registry setting is the filename to look for the programmable SMARTSHADER script in. The script files are parsed by the driver and transferred as binary data packets to the hardware. All the driver ever does is convert information into packets the hardware can understand so there are no surprises here.

I'd like to see some people outside ATI design some cool shaders. I'm especially interested in seeing what someone with some artistic talent can do with this scripting language. So far you've seen what 2 driver writers with no artistic ability can do with this feature (Roger I hope you don't mind me criticizing your artistic talent:)).

Roger - The SMARTSHADER effects plug-in tool lets you write your own post-processing shader effects. It has a small scripting language in it which uses a subset of the ARB_fragment_program extension and lets you write lots of effects that you might find interesting.

Right now the scripting language has support for variables, temporary surface allocation, and reading in user-defined textures. Variables persist across frames, so you can increment a counter on one swap and do something with the result on another. For examples we provide text files which implement all the effects which were previously hard-coded in the driver. Some of the examples are simple- just a few lines long- and some of them are more complicated. They're kind of fun to play around with. You can modify the ones which are already there or create your own.

What would we like to see emerge? We're not sure. It depends how popular the feature is. If no one requests any new features, we probably won't do anything with it at all. We read your message boards, though. We don't talk much there, but we pay attention to what people say. If people ask for certain features, we'd be willing to entertain their ideas. We won't put cheats in, and it is, after all, a part-time project for fun for the driver guys, so we can't really do any major changes, but we'll gladly listen to ideas from the people who are interested.