Katrina, you might be interested in reading up on Real Time Raytracing, which is an alternative to rasterisation (GPU) based rendering and is/has been extensively researched and even implemented.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Wars:_Ray_Traced At the moment though it seems GPUs are going to stay very mainstream. On Saturday, June 19, 2010, joshua simmons <simmons...@gmail.com> wrote: > Oh yeah I understand. There is only very rudmentry 3d support, in no way > capable of supporting any game. My point was more on the radical rate at > which they are evolving in comparison. Even the purely reverse engineered > open source NVIDIA driver is out doing the proprietary one in terms of 2d. > Now I of course realise there is a big jump from that to capable 3d, but > considering (iirc) amd have developers working on the open source driver, I > see it as mainly a matter of time before it becomes a viable alternative. > > On 18 Jun 2010 22:01, "Bob Somers" <magicbob...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Katrina, I'm not giving lectures on computer graphics here. Google has > all the information you asked for. If you'd like, I can also recommend > some graphics textbooks which would clear things up. Also, saying a > Linux system running on a 100 MHz machine is comparable to Windows > running on a 2 GHz machine is a ridiculous overstatement. They are not > that radically different. If you're so convinced you can make the > words best software renderer, by all means go do it. I'm sure at the > very least you can wave your SIGGRAPH paper in our faces when you're > done. > > Josh, I'm not sure you can call it better Linux support if their 3D > support is... well... really bad. They may have opened up their > hardware spec so that the free drivers can get rolling (I have tried > the new drivers in Fedora 13 and they are quite good so far), but the > free drivers are at least a year behind their Windows counterpart in > terms of supporting the full features of the cards. There is virtually > zero shader support in the free drivers at this point. nVidia's > drivers, on the other hand, may be proprietary, but at least you can > get decent 3D performance out of the machine on a current distro. The > proprietary ATI driver has decent support and performance, but it > won't run on anything newer than Fedora 11. (Sorry if I keep > referencing things in terms of Fedora versions, it's my distro of > choice.) > > I'm all for free software, don't get me wrong. I would love for > nothing more than to have free alternative drivers for ATI and nVidia > cards, but if gaming is really going to be commercially viable on the > Linux desktop it's the performance that matters. No publisher is going > to bother trying to ship a game for Linux where the poor driver > support is going to cause them support headaches all day long. > > --Bob > > > > > > On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 4:38 AM, joshua simmons <simmons...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> Actually to be h... > >> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, > please visit: >> http://list... > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please > visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders > > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
