arne anka wrote: > to be honest -- i never really could figure out what's the diff between 2d > and 3d acceleration. > so, what limitations does it impose?
in a nutshell: 3D acceleration builds quickly 3D models on the display. Displaying a 3D application on non-accelerated video is slow and CPU (i.e. battery) intensive. 3D applications include games but not only. my personal interest for the OpenMoko is as a device to display Virtual Reality (VR). That's a 3D application where a picture is mapped on a sphere or cube and rotated by the user. 3D-accelerated displays have a much higher frame per second (FPS) resulting in smoother viewing or faster panning. You can see an example of such a VR at <http://www.photopla.net/080302dufferin/> - click on the thumbnail to enter the VR in one of the four main technologies available: - QuickTime - Java - Flash - Shockwave If you are on Windows or on Mac, Shockwave is the only 3D accelerated viewer and you will see how much smoother it is than the rest of the pack (click on the help link to change viewer). If you are on Linux, <http://freepv.sf.net/> can display QuickTime VR with 3d acceleration. In SVN there is even a version that will deal with the Shockwave format as well. I recently displayed a VR panorama with Java on a Nokia cell phone <http://panospace.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/vr-panorama-on-a-nokia-cell-phone/> the viewer makes use of Java's 3D engine, though I am not sure if it uses a 3D accelerator on my specific phone (or on any phone). Java and Flash are just introducing 3D acceleration (for PCs) in their upcoming versions. Yuv _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community