Jared Putnam wrote:
--- James Richard Tyrer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I believe that there are two methods for actually emulating reality:
ray
tracing and radiosity. Both of these are beyond the capabilities of
a
Video adapter.
To do reality, a video board would need an array processor.
You seem to be confused. Refer to Ego Shooter[1] and Oasen[2]. Watch
the movie for Oasen. Then you can read about their system, OpenRT[3].
I see nothing to indicate that OpenRT runs on on a video card.
The video card has an array processor. It's difficult to work with,
but a perfectly good array processor nonetheless.
If you say that a video card has an array processor, you are saying
something about the meaning of array processor, not something about a
video card.
How do you compute the cross product of two 256 x 1 vectors on a video
card? How many instructions does it take? -- more than one?
If you know what Floating Point Systems used to make, you would not use
the term array processor to refer to a video card. Hardware has changed
over the years and array processor has taken on a slightly different
meaning, a system with a lot of processors now does the same job that
FPS's hardware did and it is now called an array processor although the
correct term is NUMA. Now, ClearSpeed is making a new type of array
processor that will do the same job.
Did you visit the ClearSpeed site?
You might say that a shader is a vector processor. Yes, it is (perhaps
it is better to call it a superscaler processor), but an OpenGL shader
works with vectors with a maximum size of 4. As I said, this hardware
is some help with ray tracing, but that doesn't make it an array
processor with the meaning applied to FPS's hardware.
--
JRT
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