I'm hearing about the new 3d cards and rendition ready games.ie: ICR2
and NASCAR2. What is the rendition chip and 3d card going to do for
the games?? Thanks for answering!
Mick
Well it adds quite a lot. First off is the frame rate improvement (my P120
runs ICR2 with full detail at 30fps). Secondly, and perhaps more
importantly, is the ability of these cards to greatly enhance image quality
through: anti-aliasing, perspective correction, bi-linear filtering,
shading, transparency, and other features. I could go into detail about
all of these, but it's easier to refer you to Rendition's webpage.
For some pictures and brief descriptions of these see:
http://www.rendition.com/tech.html
--
Emory University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Nascar Setups Page: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~ebusch/
>I'm hearing about the new 3d cards and rendition ready games.ie: ICR2
>and NASCAR2. What is the rendition chip and 3d card going to do for
>the games?? Thanks for answering!
>Mick
Normally VGA and SVGA graphics cards provide a bunch of memory that is
mapped to dots on your screen (an oversimplification, but you get the
idea). In a game like NASCAR, each object on the screen is typically made
up of multiple polygons with a texture that is mapped onto the polygon. The
CPU in the machine has to calculate the value of each pixels, based on a
mathematical formula to convert the 3-dimensional coordinates of the
polygon to the 2-dimensional space on the computer monitor.
The Rendition chip is a 3D graphics accelerator, basically a second
processor in your computer that handles drawing graphics. Now when the
program wants to draw a texture mapped polygon on the screen, it simply
feeds the coordinates of the object to the 3D accelerator, and it does the
work of drawing the polygon. In the meantime, the CPU can go off and fetch
the coordinate of the next polygon.
The Rendition chip takes this one step further, by allowing the CPU to
queue up a whole bunch of requests in its own memory. The Rendition chip
then accesses the commands in order, as it completes the last one. The CPU
can then go off and do other things while the Rendition chip is busy
drawing the frame.
There are also other benefits when you have a specialized accelerator chip.
You can design the chip to do the sorts of special operations required to
do graphics rather than using a general purpose instruction set like that
in the Intel 80x86 family. You can optimize the memory interface to
maximize the number of memory operations that can take place in a given
time period.
The downside is that there's no standard for 3D acceleration yet, other
than Microsoft's Win'95 Direct3D API. This means that DOS games have to
have a special driver written specifically for each 3D chip that they will
support. As such, you probably won't see many DOS games come out with 3D
chip support unless they require the kind of graphics performance a 3D
accelerator provides. With Sierra selling a Rendition-based video, card,
you can probably expect to see more Sierra titles supporting the Rendition
chips.
Dave (davids) Sparks
Late Night League
http://www.sequoia-dev.com/Hawaii/latenite.html
