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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Haim Barad who wrote (58977)	6/27/1998 6:30:00 PM
From: Steve Porter	Respond to of 186894

Haim, While 3D HW is continuing to become more and more powerful, rasterization is only part of the game. You're right.. most new video chipsets include gemoetry setup iengines and some of the better ones even have lighting engines in them. There are rumours that 3dfx is working on a Physics capable processor to handle just the kind of work you are talking about. My opinion is that excellent 3D HW can really make a powerful CPU shine (not look less important). And my opinion is that this is based on todays technology. Let's look at the progression in the videocard market shall we: Basic Text out. Basic bitmap rendering device (i.e. no acceleration of anything) 2D windows accerlation Basic 3d acceleration (i.e. gourad shading etal) Better 3d acceleration (texture mapping, scaling, etc..) Still Better 3D acceleration (lighting acceleration, geometry processor) <--- this is where we are now. Even Better Still 3d (this goes on until everything to go with rendering a 3d scene is in the graphics processor....why? Well that's what the card makers want and have said they are shooting for). Intel knows what I am saying is true. They are trying to keep more of the rendering power in the CPU. It has been well published and I think Intel even has some "white papers" on this (boy people have white papers on everything now don't they). It won't be more than 2 years until you just feed the raw xyz coordinates into the video card and it does everything else.. (untouched, straight out of the map or scene file). Steve