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.
Ok, that makes sense. Even if we could have a bunch of parallel
programmable
shaders, we cannot have anywhere near 100 of them.
I knew there was something I was forgetting... reading too much about
GPGPU
corrupts one's view of graphics ;-)
Nicholas
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