On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Blosser, Jeremy wrote:
> Now, of course, you have the intergraph cards and SGI boxes (boxen?) which
> have super cool 3D accelerators in 'em which support geometry acceleration,
> so I suppose it would be feasable to code something for these that'd just
> plain rock... A good example would be the Intense3d Wildcat 4105 which does
> matrix transforms and the specs say 3000MFLOPS... I wasn't able to figure
> out what the precision is, but I'd imagine that it's double precision...
>
> So, if anyone wants to donate either an NV10 or some other hardware
> accelerated 3D card to me, I'll write the software for it. :)
I seem to remember something like this being discussed before, probably
on the RC5 list. I have *no* experience in this area, but don't
video cards have proprietary firmware that's somehow burned into the card?
And why would drawing pictures *need* double precision?
I've also thought about e.g. putting a DSP and a few megs of memory on
a PCI card...even for 32-bit fixed-point math those little guys just
fly! Build a Schonhage-Strassen DWT, arrange things so that you DMA
the next batch of data into the DSP's internal memory while crunching
away on the present segment, and get out of the way :) You can even
buy multiprocessor DSP boards that have ridiculous amounts of firepower
on them.
And then there are the weirdos who want to make laser printers crack
RC5 keys, or (shudder) get Furbees to do it.
jasonp
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