<<<<<<What is Geometry Assist?>>>>>>
Geometry assist is what 3dFX did in there latter Voodoo5 drivers just before they went out of business, its basically a driver trick that fools the HW T&L game into thinking the 3d card has a HW T&L unit, then the driver uses the system CPU to emulate the HW T&L unit, Voodoo5 cards actually got a good boost in speed over using the SW T&L engine with this trick.
<<<<<<It will be a good 5 yrs before any CPU is released capable of matching the raw processing power of the GeForce 2 GTS GPU.>>>>>>>
I won't be anywhere near 5 years until the CPU is capable of maching the real processing power of the Geforce 2 GTS.
<<<<<<<1024x768 is still excellent with T&L. it beats the Kyro2.>>>>>>>>>
Thats a totally generalized statement, in what game?, which card with a HW T&L unit are you talking about?, just to say HW T&L beats the Kyro II at this resolution means nothing at all.
<<<<<<<<I think The Kyro is limited to 8 layers in a single pass. All the Kyro review sites keep saying upto 8 layers. The Quake 3 Engine supports upto 10 layer cascading in its multi texturing. The minimum is two.>>>>>>>>>
No your wrong, review sites may say that but what do they work on?, the specs written on the box probably, I know its not limited to 8 textures in this area, I've already said the card is limited only by 8 textures in a single pass being the limit in DX8, IMGTEC did not want to advertise a feature that couldn't be used in both API's, the Kyro II can use 8 textures in a single pass because it keeps the tile its working on inside the chips catch until it finished adding all the textures, if it was supported in a game it could add more textures to the tile inside the chips catch and still only pass it out to ram once.
<<<<<<<<<I may be wrong but I don't think the polygons have to be reloaded in the 'traditional' Multitexturing card>>>>>>>
No they don't have to reloaded the polys when only 2 texture layers are used on a card with 2 TU's because it can do 2 textures in 1 pass, but once the card goes from single pass multi-texturing to multi-pass multi-texturing poly's then have to be reloaded for each additional pass, so after the first 2 texture layers have been sent to ram the polys then have to be reloaded for the second 2 texture layers and then again for another 2 and again for the final 2 texture layers (thats with 8 texture layers)
<<<<<<From Direct3D6 up to 8 texture operation units can be cascaded together to apply multiple textures to a common primitive in a single pass (multitexturing)>>>>>>>
AFAIK there's nothing in DX that allows a traditional with say 2 TU's to send out 8 textures in only 1 pass to the framebuffer, or am I misunderstanding you?
<<<<<<<Appart from the Base skin Texture, Doom 3 is only certain to have only two others: Bump Mapping and Dot Products. I'm sure there will be more.>>>>>>>>
Well Carmack said the game would have an overdraw of 8, allot of people first thought he meant actual opaque overdraw as in writing over already written pixels in the framebuffer, but then the general consensus was he couldn't possibly have that level of overdraw in his game because it would totally kill the performance of any traditional so everyone then thought he was talking about 8 texture layers, if he wasn't talking about either of them then what was he talking about when he said 8 overdraw?, any ideas?
<<<<<<As it currently stands, Doom 3 will not contain software Geometry code. But once the game is released, there may be some development for a dreamcast port with severe limitations. The non-T&L community can hope this will also bring a Software geometry pc release.>>>>>>
Were do you get that from, were did he say this?, I'd appretiate a link for this comment, again though geometry assist will sort that out.
<<<<<<<<You commend the Kyro for its innovative Tilers but revert to the preference of redundancies with the wasteful Multitexturing over Pixel Shaders?
Besides, the Doom 3 engine will be scalable, allowing the features that require programmable shaders to be disabled. The penalty is much of the eyecandy will also disspear.>>>>>>>
Thats what I'm saying, pixel shaders won't be an integral part of the game, he'll use them but not to a huge extent so that none pixel shader cards can just turn the option off and still keep enough visual quality to make the game look awesome on cards without pixels shaders.
<<<<<<<That is just rubbish. Not every one aquires technology to pull a "Microsoft" i.e. just to bury the competition and forget about them. You Aquire technology to to use it. Whats better than having that technology in your products rather than in your competition.
They aquired 40 former SGI staff with the Gigapixel technology from 3DFX. They will be busy in implementing their designs into nVidia Technology. This means Tiling just like the Kyro II cards. I don't think nVidia will be furthering the development into napalm or rampage for release products. But they will be researched into, to resolve any potential issues, and to use any good concepts and ideas from those designs.>>>>>>>>
No it isn't rubbish actually, from what I've heard they won't touch tile based rendering, thats what I'm hearing from people that are very very close to the industry, but I don't expect anyone to actually beleive me since nobody here knows me or the people I'm talking about, and I wouldn't want to drop names either, but obviously Nvidia could end up going tile based, IMO they actually have to, maybe they'll realise that too soon.
<<<<<<<Ahh, There will always be faster ram, providing you spend enough towards it. Come on, Every one except intel must be grateful about them speeding up the ddr development.>>>>>
Ram jut isn't moving fast enough, its taking longer and longer to produce faster ram now, Nvidia can only seem to add features to there new cards, the days when a new Nvidia card comes out and wipes the floor with the last one in performance seem to be gone.
<<<<<<And Yep! Doom 3 will have 3D textures.>>>>>>>
Apparently Geforce 3 doesn't support 3D textures though so thats already one feature in Doom 3 that the Geforce 3 doesn't have.
It it no way was to profess to me as being all knowledgable, for nothing could be further from the truth. And I did not call into question the validity of your knowledge but, I am not sure if that is in fact what you meant by that either. At any rate thanks for the link.
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