On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 05:34:12PM -0700, Tim Roberts wrote: | On Sun, 15 Sep 2002 23:59:19 -0700, Jon Leech wrote: | > | > I'm surprised that XFree86 seems to be unconcerned with the 18-24 | >month timeframe in which most PC graphics hardware will have fully | >programmable transform and raster engines, huge amounts of per-pixel | >memory, and support high-precision floating point throughout the | >graphics pipeline, among other good stuff. | | What makes you think so?
DX9 requires it. Failure to provide it in a timely fashion would pretty much guarantee a hardware vendor's demise. Much of what Jon mentioned has been shipping since the Spring 2002 release cycle; the rest is shipping in high-end systems (e.g. Radeon 9700) now, and is expected to start moving down-market in Spring 2003. Widespread availability in 18-24 months sounds about right. | The state-of-the-art PC graphics card today is not all that much different | from the state-of-the-art PC graphics card of 24 months ago. ... Hmm. NVIDIA's press releases for previous years are online, so I took a quick look. The GeForce3 hadn't been announced as of September 2000, so the state-of-the-art PC graphics card of 24 months ago lacked vertex-processing programmability, not to mention a host of other texturing and fragment-processing features. I don't recall seeing a card with more than 64MB of memory at the time; the six-month-old card I'm using now has 128MB, and 256MB cards are available. Things have changed a *lot* in the past 24 months. Allen _______________________________________________ Render mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/render
