EMBM

[DoomStar]

Is this true?

"I heard that the GeForce 256 is supposed to do dot product bump mapping in hardware, which is superior to EMBM in some instances (eg. for non-reflective surfaces such as stone or wood). Ideally a card would support T&L, EMBM and dot product bump mapping, which would allow the developers to pick the technique they felt was most appropriate for what they want to achieve."

[Snake-Eyes]

Well the ideal part sounds right, but as far as whether the GeForce has it, I don't think so. NVidia's technical specifications only show stuff about their C-cubed bump-mapping, and as far as I know, that's not the same thing. They don't mention any of the other forms either. Obviously they can do the standard alpha-blended method, in addition to their proprietary stuff (which might hurt support for the method, since it's unique- at least for now).

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Ace

[Nuno]

Yes they do:

From Nvidia press release:

256-bit 3D processor
Integrated geometry transform engine
Integrated dynamic lighting engine
Four-pixel rendering pipeline
480 million pixels per second fill rate
15 million triangles/s throughput
Cube-environment mapping using projective textures and vertex blending
Single-pass emboss and dot-product bump mapping
350MHz RAMDAC
2D resolution of 2048x1536 at 75Hz (their press release claims MHz)
AGP4X with Fast Writes
Up to 128MB RAM
OpenGL ICD for Windows98, NT4, 2000
Powerful HDTV motion compensation.
Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution.

Cube environement mapping (that´s nothing to do with bump maping) is nice, but for what I´ve read, not even the Gforce has enough power to do it properly. It will only maintain a steady fps with static environements.

Dot-product Bump Mapping is more worrysome because Gforce, Neon250 and Permedia3 support it. And only the G400 supports EMBM (and maybe that vapourware called glaze3d, after all they invented it - and microsoft got it, how surprising).




[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 09-10-1999).]