There's been discussion about shaders before, so you may want to look into the archives over this. However, I'll reiterate one of the points.
OGA1 will be reasonably fast. Not powerful, but fast. Even though it'll run at a relatively slow clock rate. Why? Parallelism. The fixed-function pipeline has the benefits of any pipeline--every pixel will take nominally one cycle to process. If there are 100 stages required to process a pixel, then you can have 100 pixels in flight, each one taking one cycle to process. Now, imagine reimplementing that serially in a programmable shader. Now, those 100 steps have to be done one after another. So each pixel now takes 100 cycles to process. This is probably an exaggeration. But it explains why shader-based GPUs have to run at 500MHz or more. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
