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

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (7816)	10/1/1998 8:50:00 AM
From: Scott Garee	Respond to of 16960

Here's some additional info from a PC Magazine article. Still lacking in plain English. :) www8.zdnet.com Scanline renderers, which render images one vertical scanline at a time instead of on an object-by-object-basis, are often used for animation sequences. Although some people consider the image quality of a scanline renderer to be inferior to that of a ray tracer, a good scanline renderer will be several times faster than a ray tracer. In practice, the line between ray tracing and scanline rendering can be fuzzy. An intelligent ray tracer may speed itself up by avoiding some calculations, while a scanline renderer will support reflections and refractions through special texture maps or may add ray-traced shadows. Procedural shaders are essential in ray tracers and scanline renderers. What you want is some level of procedural shader capability that allows you to tinker with various settings. Advanced features include bump mapping and displacement mapping (both use a texture map as the source to modify the height of an object's surface in addition to its color). So what's the best renderer? That remains a subjective decision. At the high end, Softimage's Mental Ray (a ray tracer) is often cited, with 3D Studio MAX's scanline renderer given high marks for overall balance of speed and quality. LightWave 3D is known for broadcast-quality rendering and is famous for its use on science-fiction TV programs.

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (7816)	10/1/1998 10:04:00 AM
From: Scott Garee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

You asked for it (well, at least Patrick did. :) It appears that Renderman is a scanline rendering engine. Renderman is VERY popular and information can be found all over the net on it. Quick reading seems to indicate that scanline renderers are an order of magnitude faster than ray tracers, but also an order of magnitude slower than polygon renderers. Scanline renderers do reflection and refraction easily, and also provide good shadows, though not diffuse shadows, which are best done with ray tracing. There might be ways to overcome this (shadow maps?), but I don't know what the speed/implementation costs are. Ray Tracing News was an EXCELLENT source of information, though a lot of graphobabble (to coin a new term.) lysator.liu.se I also came across an algorithm called S-buffer. Very interesting. cs.bu.edu (The base of that URL (through /Quake) is another good spot, which also includes a reference to the 3D Engine List, where one could spend days. :) cg.cs.tu-berlin.de Why did you do this to me Patrick? I see hours upon hours of my time spent weeding through these Web threads I've stumbled upon. Alas!

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (7816)	10/1/1998 10:12:00 AM
From: Scott Garee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Final note: I hope (as TDFX says) competitors really do know each other's roadmaps, as I think Patrick has discovered TDFX'. What an excellent piece of detective work! Didn't TDFX people also make comments about the incredible advance in image quality they were going to make? Well, that sure would be achieved with a scanline renderer. Free shadows, free reflections, free refractions. . . Holy cow! The big question is how long was TDFX working on it before the competition found out? I sure hope they knew. Shame on you Patrick if you spilled the beans! ;-)