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Technology Stocks : CYRIX / NSM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Porter who wrote (31419)	4/10/1999 5:00:00 PM
From: michael liu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 33344

Good news for NSM shareholder Mutual fund manager is promoting NSM along with QCOM. bloomberg.com

To: Steve Porter who wrote (31419)	4/21/1999 12:06:00 AM
From: SBHX	Respond to of 33344

True, one can get higher frame rate by lowering display resolutions. The thing is : I was suggesting that Whitney @1024x768x16bpp will run quake3-arena at around 10fps (Even then, this is with the config that has dedicated frame buffer). This is partly due to quake3's excessive use of multi-texturing to do lightmaps --- something that comes up as multi-pass rendering on chips like the i740. With multipass rendering, the overdraw becomes high. Assuming each frame becomes 1024x768x8 pels (overdraw of 8 instead of 5.5 due to multi-pass) 3D pels, this gives 6.3Mpels/s. If whitney was really running at 66MHz=FSB-66, it's in trouble. If you lower the display mode to 800x600 or 640x480 or 320x200, eventually, there will be a mode that will have decent frame rate. Alternately, there could be shortcuts taken (eg : turn off bilinear filtering, simplified models, turn off lightmaps - stick to ambient light) and the tradeoff of quality with framerate is also possible. However, I'm suggesting that from what is discussed today in most 3D-gaming sites, the bulk of 3Dgaming has moved to 1024x768x16bpp (with some fringe hardcore advocating 32bpp true color). If this is not so, then the performance bar is a lot lower. This constant need for better quality gaming experience is the thing that has helped keep graphics chips from becoming a 'commodity'. At some point it probably will stop, but noone really knows what that point is. Whitney only capable fo 10fps on Quake3.. that I find REALLY hard to believe.. considering software rendering can do better than that.