On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 06:29:54PM -0700, Raystonn wrote: > First off, current market leaders began their hardware designs back when the > main CPU was much much slower. They have an investment in this technology > and likely do not want to throw it away. Back when these companies were > founded, such 3d rendering could not be performed on the main processor at > all. The computational power of the main processor has since increased > dramatically. The algorithmic approach to 3d rendering should be reexamined > with current and future hardware in mind. What was once true may no longer > be so. > > Second, if a processor intensive algorithm was capable of better efficiency > than a bandwidth intensive algorithm, there is a good chance these > algorithms would be movd back over to the main CPU. If the main processor > took over 3D rendering, what would the 3D card manufacturers sell? It would > put them out of business essentially. Therefore you cannot gauge what is > the most efficient algorithm based on what the 3D card manufacturers decide > to push. They will push whatever is better for their bottom line and their > own future.
I'm getting very tired of this thread. If modern CPUs are soooo much better for 3D, then why does Intel, of all companies, still make its own 3D hardware in addition to CPUs?!? If the main CPU was so wonderful for 3D rendering, Intel would be all over it. In fact, they tried to push that agenda once when MMX first became available. Remember? Had it come out before the original Voodoo Graphics, things might have been different for a time. You know what they found out with all of the hundreds of millions of dollars they spent? Dedicated hardware still does it faster and cheaper. Period. It's just like writing a custom routine to sort an array will pretty much always be faster than using the generic qsort. When you hand-tune for a specific data set you will always get better performance. This is not to say that the generic implementation will not perform well or even acceptably well, but only to say that it will never, ever, ever perform better. -- Tell that to the Marines! _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
