Stephen J Baker wrote: > >>>>Everything starts out in hardware and eventually moves to software. >>> >>>That's odd - I see the reverse happening. First we had software >> >>The move from hardware to software is an industry-wide pattern for all >>technology. It saves money. 3D video cards have been implementing new >>technologies that were never used in software before. Once the main >>processor is able to handle these things, they will be moved into software. >>This is just a fact of life in the computing industry. Take a look at what >>they did with "Winmodems". They removed hardware and wrote drivers to >>perform the tasks. The same thing will eventually happen in the 3D card >>industry. > > > That's not quite a fair comparison.
I agree. You may want to take a look at the following article: http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001q2/tnl/index.x?pg=1 It shows, among other things, a 400MHz PII with a 3dfx Voodoo2 (hardware rasterization) getting almost double the framerate of a 1.4GHz Athlon doing software rendering with Quake2 -- and the software rendering is not even close to the quality of the hardware rendering due to all the shortcuts being taken. What we are seeing, throughout the industry, is a move to programmable graphics engines rather than fixed-function ones. Programmable vertex and fragment pipelines are not the same as a software implementation on a general purpose CPU, as the underlying hardware still has the special functionality needed for 3D graphics. I suspect that this will continue to be true for a very, very long time. -- Gareth _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
