New Article Up on 3D Overtime
Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs
Michael Fleming has a new article up on 3D Overtime for all you 3D junkies.
(:
Here is a clip:
The Voodoo 2 has a setup engine capable of processing as many as 4 million
triangles per second; the Riva TNT can purportedly process up to 8 million.
Wow! That’s great, but… what does it mean? And, what’s more, how come we don
’t see all those triangles in games? After all, even Quake 2 doesn’t boast
much more than a couple of hundred thousand per second: why can’t we play it
with models 10x as detailed? Hmmm…
What does it mean?
Just what is "triangle setup"? To answer that, we have to dive into the
anatomy of a triangle as a 3D chip sees it. As far as your 3D hardware is
concerned, a triangle is composed of 3 vertices, each of which is described
by a set of information, such as where each vertex lies in the relevant
texture map(s), where it is in space (x, y, z coordinates), its lighting and
color information, etc. For this discussion, though, the most important
pieces of information that must be supplied for the vertices are gradients.
Gradients are values that the 3D hardware uses to gradually and accurately
blend colors, textures, brightness, etc. across a triangle: these values
must be calculated from the spatial, texture, lighting and color information
before a textured, lit triangle can be properly drawn.
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Regards,
Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs
http://www.voodooextreme.com/3Fingers/
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Ryan Hoenle
about a separate triangle setup chip on a PCI card?
Is this conceivable? Sure, Intel wouldn't like it that you could double or
triple your triangle setup just by swapping your dedicated triangle setup
card, but think of the possibilities...
1. Extended System Life. (Faster 3D only card available? pop it in, faster
triangle setup card? pop it in. :)
2. The CPU can get back to running AI, etc... (not to mention mpeg-2
decoding when we get 3D games running on top of DVD movies (whatever, you
get the idea...)
3. The ability to chose the best 3D card and the best triangle setup chip
(not be stuck with the one that comes with your all-in-one card...)
4. 3Dfx and others can get back to designing 3D cards and not worry about on
chip triangle setup (maybe a cost improvment too?)
Potential Difficulties:
1. Cost? (although, who among us wouldn't pay $100-$150 bux to drop in a
3x-5x triangle setup improvement?)
2. Drivers? (of course Intergraph does this, so in theory there doesn't seem
to be any OpenGL problem, how about D3D?)
3. Incompatibility?
4. PCI Bandwidth?
5. System bus bandwidth if we're talking AGP 3D & PCI Triangle Setup?
Any Thoughts?
Ryan E. Hoenle
Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs wrote in message <6ocu0s$ile$1...@news.3dfx.com>...