Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Waldeen who wrote (7447)	9/21/1998 6:10:00 PM
From: Simon Cardinale	Respond to of 16960

Waldeen: geometry acceleration and parallelism I'm not really qualified to say what aspects of a CPU's function should be offloaded onto an on-board geometry processor. (I'm a geologist, not a chip or game developer.) However, the general criteria it should meet are these. 1) Functions that that a serious bottleneck in current CPUs. 2) Something not well addressed by Intel's new Katmai chips. 3) Functions that will be increasingly used by future games. 4) Something that will be supported by Microsoft in D3D at some date in the future (Glide first, of course, but DirectX is necessary lest MS support some other variety of geometry acceleration from a competitor.) I'm a gamer, not a developer, so I can't tell you what fits those criteria. Maybe Got2MuchTime can address it (he appears to be back, since he posted a new 3DOvertime message a week ago.) On your pixel/region based rendering question (like PowerVR second generation) I think that this sort of thing probably won't scale too well with resolution. I'm sure there are other reasons why the majority of the industry has gone another route, though. Simon