Emanuel Brzostowski wrote:
Wouldn't it make sense, to let J3D use doubles internally (everywhere), and converting them to floats only when nessecary (i.e. when passing the data to DirectX or OpenGL)?
It does almost exactly this. It just cache converted data, so it will not have to be recreated on every frame. Of course, if you will look at it from different perspective, it means that it ignores your format and just converts everything to floats. You can use other formats, because sometimes it can be easier for you to work with such data - Tuplexf contains many utility methods. As for doubles, you may for example want to operate on double arrays coming from other library, modify it using high precision (sometimes can make a big difference) and then pass directly to java3d, without having to care about converting double[] -> float[] manually. Regardless of what java3d do, common graphic hardware works on floats. You will see the problems with precision anyway. So what is the point of doubling memory usage of java3d, just to be able to say 'it is not our fault, it is hardware problem' ? Please also note that java3d tries to be renderer agnostic. It is possible that some dedicated hardware can work with full range of doubles. In such case, java3d API will not have to change to accomodate this. Or maybe somebody would like to write software renderer to be used in servlets, which will use doubles internally. You were assuming that you can work with full range of double - you get burned. You need to redesign part of your application. It happens often when playing with hardware rendering. Next time you can have some great idea and discover that some part will kill performance. Or hit zbuffer tearing on low end card, which is not visible on your GeForce NV55. With 3d graphics, you need to test and adapt, again and again. Remember to turn off refresh synchronization - this is very often cause of ugly surprises when checking performance. Artur =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
