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

To: Simon Cardinale who wrote (7519)	9/22/1998 3:51:00 AM
From: Greg S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

3Dfx patent: (Quick OT: I'm talking about applets - they can do cool things.) Anyway, regarding the 3Dfx lawsuit and how the patent is supposedly on their "design" .. let's just say that if you want to combine two texture maps onto one pixel with a single pass, the way 3Dfx did it is pretty much -THE- way to do it. You get yourself two (or more) processors, feed them data from two (or more) textures, map them to the desired pixel, and blend the signals in some way. That's all the technical mumbo jumbo says - it covers various permutations and uses of the plurality of texel processors to work with signals. Multitexturing has been done in multiple passes since the 80s, and while I don't have any evidence offhand, I find it a bit hard to believe that SGI or E & S never thought of doing it in one pass before now; I'm almost POSITIVE that hardware exists that will testify to this. In fact, seeing as nVidia is made from the cream of the crop that used to work for SGI, I wouldn't be surprised if the nVidia folks had the idea first (and just failed to realize a reasonable implementation on a mainstream graphics card) I think that 3Dfx patenting this "method" of multitexturing would be like patenting chewing as a method of breaking down food for consumption. -G (still a TDFX bull, of course)