|
In response from your article at:
http://guru3d.com/tech/editorials/1/index.shtml
It has been WIDELY known that 3dfx's next chip set will indeed
support 32 bit color rendering on final output. I don't know why
anyone thinks that 3dfx would be suicidal enough to try and
not make a 32 bit color card when games actually start shipping
that make use of it.
If you reread all the other T-Buffer
technology reviews
everyone says that 3dfx has mentioned that they will indeed
support 32 bit color output.
OpenGL has had specifications for an
Accumulation Buffer
nearly since its inception. As 3dfx stated, their T-Buffer
is based off the Accumulation Buffer. It seems that
OpenGL supports all the effects of the Accum Buffer
already. I'de hope that it would just be a matter of
developers using that part of OpenGL and having it
work with 3dfx's T-Buffer. Just take a look at the
following OpenGL information: In particular,
Section 9 on Using The Accumulation Buffer:
http://www.sgi.com/software/opengl/advanced96/notes.html
http://www.sgi.com/software/opengl/advanced96/node38.html
#SECTION000100000000000000000
Also with plenty of games coming out that use Intel's
Multi-Resolution-Mesh or other Tessellation technology,
the number of polygons can scale relatively easily
and painlessly to make what matters most look the
best it can without impacting system performance
beyond a reasonable level. The items in the foreground
will have the details they need while items in the
background that can afford to have less detail.
Take a look at Team Fortress 2 for this technology
in action. This technology sort of lessens the impact
of hardware T&L.
And a thing about the NV10 hardware
T&L... In order for
it to be of any use, the game must make use of DX7's
built in Transform & Lighting engine. Nearly all games
that use DX6 use their own custom Transform & Lighting
engine. The NV10's T&L impact on past games in DX is nonexistent.
And as for OpenGL games, the game must also make use of the
built in Transform and Lighting engine, which I'm
not sure many of them do. So the impact on already
existing games is small there as well.
The bottleneck is still in the transfer
speed from the
CPU to the video card. And video card T&L will not
help this one bit with the massive amounts of data
that will need to be sent across every frame update.
And now here is a clip from an
interview with
Terminal Reality, the makers of Nocturne
{Page 2: http://www.firingsquad.com/games/nocturneinterview/page2.asp
FS: The camera in Nocturne is static to
help keep frame rates up,
right? Do you think that video cards with transform and
lighting (NVIDIA NV10) will allow for a Nocturne sequel with
a moveable camera?
TR: Hardware transform and lighting
would make Nocturne slower and
look worse. People really don't understand what the bottlenecks
are in 3D right now. Since our game does skeletal animation of
characters, we can easily append on transform operations with
no time hit. Because of that, we know which polys are visible,
and which aren't, so we only have to upload the visible polys,
instead of all the polys, which makes rendering much faster.
Half the number of polygons uploaded to the card every frame
doubles your frame rate. It's that simple. Also, using hardware
transforms, we'd have to upload twice the geometry that's
necessary to render each frame. If we left all the geometry
on the card to combat that, then that wouldn't leave any room
for texture maps. And for hardware lighting, we could use it,
but you'd loose the real-time shadows. Would you mind loosing
the real-time shadows? We would.
Oh, and the reason 3dfx doesn't
announce anything before
it's time, and the same reason Nvidia is the same way
now is that they have Stock out there and have a
responsibility to their Stock Holders. If they even
make any announcement about a product and that product
never happens, they open themselves up to a major class
action lawsuit. Or if they fail to hit the numbers that
they might have said, they are open for a lawsuit.
Anything they say and do is a possible means for a lawsuit
to be filed. That is why the companies with stock say
as little as they can, and when they do, they make sure
they damn well have everything exact.
And as for that nvidia announcement,
none of that was
from them [NVIDIA], so that could all change as well!
There's nothing special about a 350 MHz Ramdac or AGP4x,
nearly every single card will have that, so it's pretty
much a "standard".
All in all, neither of these
technologies (T&L / T-Buffer)
will have a major impact on games. Perhaps the biggest
impact will be having three to four times the fill rate
of current hardware. It has been hinted that both
cards (V4/NV10) will have fill rates around 1200 - 1600 Mtex/sec.
--|BRiT|
|
