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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Simon Cardinale who wrote (7227)	9/15/1998 3:21:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

An important method missed by Michael is a technique that I used in the very old days when I had time to actually program for fun. I can't remember the name but it sounded like "luminacity". It is similar to ray tracing but it does all its calculations up fron. Essentially you describe all your surface geometries, textures, and light sources to the computer. The computer then spends the next 3 days (that is litterally how long it took in those days) calculating the incremental reflections from every surface in every direction. This result was stored in various matrices. When you would move your "ray traced" like object and all the reflection and shadow calculation was reduced to a matrix multipication, making it possible to animate objects with ray trace like quality. The draw backs are the large pre-calculation times and the large amount of disk space required for the matrices. If 3Dfx can create properitary algorithms to modify this approach and lease those libraries to the developers, they will have a good chance at owning the graphics market. Sun Tzu