With multiple cores, real time ray tracing becomes possible. But
it will still be useful IMNSHO to have a 'smart' framebuffer
that can do image resizing and compositing itself instead of
doing that on the CPU. So the open-graphics card will still be
useful.
Implemented by video card developers? I doubt it. What is more
likely is general purpose CPUs built onto the graphics card, so
you can download a raytracer at runtime.
Agreed. This will be unlikely for quite some time, however, because
modern CPUs are just too slow (that sounds weird... ;-)).
Maybe once CPUs start having 16+ cores it will be viable to vendors,
but for now most users are happy with the current rendering model.
Raytracing produces really, really beautiful and lifelike images, but
it requires a lot of repetitive computation ==> Not well suited to CPU.
In terms of OGA/ODG, we should probably support enough of OpenGL that
linux apps are reasonably fast. Modern CPUs are reasonable at some
things, so if a subset of OpenGL is supported (on intermediate
boards), the most possible computation should be run on the graphics
card. I use ratpoison as my window manager, but people using Metacity
or the like might have varying results on performance - we should
probably test these out in the future (the very, very far future) to
see how pleasing it is.
As for a smart framebuffer, I totally agree. Even the ability to
quickly shade a 2D polygon in hardware can GREATLY speed up almost
any graphics application (this is not from any real experience with
HW-accelerated polys, but I know from testing framebuffer graphics
apps on different processors how much of a difference it makes. I am
sure this scale up the GFLOPs nicely :-)). Of course, we should
support more than that, but starting small is always nice.
nick
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