Is there an AMD equivalent of nVidia's NVAPI?
I was hoping for some info from an ATI rep. Do you guys supply any API similar to nVidia's NVAPI for the purposes of detecting the GPU's capabilities. A colleague of mine had this to say:
"GPU VRAM detection is not straight-forward, especially if you are interested in physical card memory. NVIDIA makes this somewhat easy for their cards via their NVAPI library, but AMD/ATI AFAIK does not provide anything like this – you have to rely on DX or DXGI to try to get numbers. Vista pre-SP1 gives totally bogus numbers, and all ‘working’ versions will not always give you physical amounts, just virtual (physical + what the OS ill also give you on-demand)".
Many seem to take the approach of maintaining an exhaustive spreadsheet, but a more informed hueristic approach would seem far more robust and future proof. I heard from another colleague that their ATI rep had indicated that an AMD equivalent to NVAPI might exist for this purpose.
I'm investigating the best way to detect recommended DX9 graphics settings for an upcoming game we're developing on Vista+ and XP. Has anyone got experience detecting the recommended graphics settings based on the player’s hardware, and what set of parameters should comprise the “graphics options”, e.g. Texture Detail, AA Quality, Shadow Quality etc. etc?
On Windows Vista+, what about using the Windows Experience Index? It looks like it is possible to query the individual component scores such as CPU and GPU.
