Hello Raystonn, sorry, but a dedicated ASIC hardware is always faster. (you are a troll, arent you?)
in the straight forward OpenGL case (flat and smooth shading) you can turn on several features in the pixel path and in the geometry pipeline (culling, 8x lighting, clipping) that you wont be able to perform at the same speed with a normal CPU setup. Its not only the bandwidth, its the floating point performance which the grafics chips are capable of by the meance of multiple parallel and dedicated FPU units. For the pixel path, when (multi) texturing is enabled or alpha blending or fogging or somtehing else that does readback (stencil buffer, depth buffer dependent operations, anit aliased lines) then you will spot that a classical CPU and processor system will not perform at its best if doing pixel manipulations of that sort. I think a regular grafics hardware can clean up your framebuffer in a fraction of the time, that a cpu-mainboard pairing can do. Thats the case since the good old IBM VGA from ages ago. And dont tell me an UMA architecture is better in that case. You first have to accept that the RAM DAC is time sharing the same bus system and therefore it permanently consumes bus cycles. But if rasterisation has separate memory with an option for a wider bus, separate chaces and higher clocked memory you will get better performance by design. Regards, Alex. -----Original Message----- From: Raystonn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 19:45 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Mesa3d-dev] Re: [Dri-devel] Mesa software blending [Resending, fell into last night's black hole it seems.] I am definately all for increasing the performance of the software renderer. Eventually the main system processor will be fast enough to perform all of this without the need for a third party graphics card. The only thing video cards have today that is really better than the main processor is massive amounts of memory bandwidth. Since memory bandwidth is increasing rapidly, I foresee the need for video cards lessening in the future. A properly implemented and optimized software version of a tile-based "scene-capture" renderer much like that used in Kyro could perform as well as the latest video cards in a year or two. This is what I am dabbling with at the moment. -Raystonn _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel