2007/2/16, James Richard Tyrer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
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.
I don't think it's the point. You never mind what you called a "video
card" or streaming processor or "card with a GPU".
Here, you want fast raytracing/radiosity rendering. You _could_ do it
with open-graphics 1.0 + clearspeed super chip. But it cost a lot.
It's only one possible hardware solution.
Somebody post here about the design of raytring engine using very few
hardware to do it. So raytracing could be done with very few gates.
Fewer than with a generic cpu 'tile'. There is other solution. Because
of the fact that pipelining the 3D rendering is easy, you could put
the raytracing with the video DAC.
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?
Depend on the hardware, on an asic you could put what ever you want.
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.
That's just a virtual instruction langage. Each driver recompile it to
it's own asm. Nvidia very new chip use only scalar processor, because
most of the shader code are scalar not vectorise.
I don't know any of the ratytracing/radiosity or new model like global
illumination, maybe somebody could give a link to the basic algorithme
to see if it could be easy to add.
Some rumour said that Intel is going to work on a powerfull GPU that
does more than shader.
--
JRT
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