All this talk about the G450 and very little of it is true and my thoughts on TnL

[ChickenSoup]

Ok People..
From the little I have heard about the G450 it is essentially the G400 only it will be manufactured on a .18 micron process. This should allow for increased clock speeds on the main chip and therefore better performance, that is all I heard it was.

One more thing what is all this crap about hardware TnL and Software TnL?? From what I know every 3D card has the hardware TnL done by the main processor (ie. Pentium !!! or Athlon), right? Is there such a thing as Software TnL? I thought the big deal with video cards were that the hardware Transform and Lighting is taken off of the CPU and put on the Video cards TnL engine (ie Gforce, Savage2000), which is essentially a giant floating point unit to do all of these calculations, right?? So what is happening is all of the graphical work is being sent directly to to TnL video card bypassing the CPU altogether.... Anyone getting this? Tell me If I am right or wrong, I really want to know

If I am wrong here someone please catch me before I fall off the deep end.

Anyways "that's all I got to say about that."

G800? Never heard of it.

Well what do all you Software TnLers got to say now???

And by the way I do have a G400 Max and it rules!!!

[Cole]

i'm not an expert on the new Matrox Technology, but this is what i think is going on.

there will be hardware transform, and software lighting. the chip will be based on a .18 micron, and i'm hoping for 32MB DDRAM. the G450 will be nothing new in terms of something like a GPU. it will basically be a re-vamped G400.

[vanguardian1]

As for me, I'm hoping for 64mb DDR on this G450 =D

That would translate into 32megs of RAM for each display (no more "out of video memory" errors at high resolutions with dvd's sound good to me =D

[ChickenSoup]

Wait one minute now!!!!

How the hell (pardon my language) do you get hardware transform and software lighting??? This all seems like a bunch of blah blah blah to me... Could someone please expain this whole idea of it having hardware transform and what's with software lighting???

Please correct me if I am wrong but to do the Hardware transform the G450 would have to have a giant floating point unit like the Gforce to pull this off right??? And because the G450 is the G400 manufactured on a .18 micron Process than there is no hardware Transform because Matrox has already stated that the G400 does not have TnL. Soooo, it is a simple answer the G450 does not have hardware Transform on it and as for this software lighting.... Whatever....

[paulcs]

I don't pretend to understand any of this, but there are theories, started before the G450 rumors, that the G-series' Warp engine has these capabilities.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Kruzin]

Yes, the G200/400 both have their "warp" engines, which are basically for floating point calculations. If more where added, they could theoretically be dedicated to hardware transformations.

As far as software lighting....what do you think we are using now? Run 3DMark2k, and you will see it mentioned in many places. Software simply means it is being done in the main CPU, not on the graphics card.

Besides, it's all just a bunch of rumors. Matrox has made no annoucements yet. Not on a so-called "G450", or the mysterious "G800". Until they do, I would not bet on anything (including what they are going to be called).

I think Ant just like to stir everyone up once in a while with his gossip

[gbm]

"hardware" means "done by graphics card"
"software" means "done by the CPU"

With contemporary graphics cards having some kind of programmable processors onboard (like G200 and G400), one may assign some of graphics pipeline tasks to either the CPU or the stuff on the card, no matter whether you call it WARP (Matrox) or GPU (nVidia). Depending on the processing power available, the "stuff" may do:
- triangle setup (as in G200/G400)
- triangle setup and transformations
- t.s, T and lighting
- above plus clipping

See my webpages for more speculations...

[Mark F]

Nahh, he'd never do something like that!
(anyone remember the day 5.30 were released)

Also even Ge______s (fill in your own favorate) do mixed hardware/software T&L in Quake Arena (or is it UT, or even both). Transform in hardware and Lighting in software; I believe. It's not a limitation of the cards/chipset/drivers (like S2K), but the way the software is written. So except for benchmarks there still isn't much use for hardware T&L.

So calm down and save your b!^$#ing for when/if Matrox hasn't anounced at T&L card and you're actually missing something! And just because you haven't got one dosen't count. That's a seperate grip, to comlain about. As is it not being released.

OK steping down for the night.

Mark F.

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OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a CD

[Mark F]

Had to sneak in there didn't you Greg.

Mark F.

[Ant]

Yes I most certainly do like stirring things up. BUT I do it very rarely and the things I stir up are correct.