The card will be a fast fixed pipeline without the shader we see in last generation card.
It was said that a "simple" shader is not necessary easy because you need to serialise some operation that are now pipelined. So it's very easy to have a slow card with shader. I remember some year ago when the trend was to replace Xorg. Some guy's use a matrox card (because it has full spec). So 4 years ago, i could see mplayer with transparent rotating windows, etc... This was possible because one guy decide to use every functionnality of the card and have the spec and not because the card respect some standard. Todays all real time 3D use triangles. The game use more and more texture, effects, but globally the number of triangles are stable. So all the game have the same kind of "look" with caracters with sharp edge. For some specialiste rasterised triangle are a dead end because the need number of triangles are exponential compare to the quality. So we heard about raytracing that scale much better, about more complexe geometrical base (nurbs, bezier surface,...). All of this as been refused because we need opengl and all of this did not fit well for OpenGl. I imagine that supporting metaballs is out of question even if this could be great for biological object. I imagine the use of an other base objet beside triangle : a sphere. It avoid the sharp edge problem and i imagine that balls have enough mathematical parameter that could ease the draw, as for the triangle. Cpu like feature is out of question because of the slow speed. So maybe some part of the pipeline could became more programable to enable the use of corner case trick. Few FMAC unit add so much power compare to a pur software approach that i can't imagine that this is not possible to find a way to extend a little bit our pipeline. I am not a specialist in 3D. Maybe all of this need too much change to be integrated in the current design. But i am pretty sur that a "nice" innovative feature that permit something hard to do with the other card even if it's hard to code or use (for the basic step), could make some buzz around the project. Nicolas Boulay _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
