'Fusion' cards

[Drizzt]

Hey, DanK, substitute the word "sotto" with the word "in" in the italian part of the site!

[dZeus]

going for 200 posts? Oops... already there!

[Pace]

And 6 pages too!

Maybe it's been the number of silly posts after the speculation died down? Though we could always try and revive it.

What about them voxels, hmm?

Paul.

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[Maggi]

Isn't it about time to move it to the Soap Box ?

[xortam]

Okay, somebody explain to me what a voxel and volumetric rendering are.

[Jorden]

Hey Maggi, why can't MHW have a 200+ thread?

Isn't voxels hardware programming of the pixels? Instead of the videocard rendering all the pixels at one time through the video-beam, they are put on the screen, as the software tells where they are to be put? Something like that...

[Randy Simons]

Voxels are 3D pixels. Take a normal bitmap, each pixel has a X and Y coordinate relative to the origin, and a color. With voxels, a pixel has X, Y and a Z coordinate. Theoretically, you can create *any* shape with that.

[Jorden]

AskJeeves said this:
"The smallest distinguishable box-shaped part of a three-dimensional space. A particular voxel will be identified by the x, y and z coordinates of one of its eight corners, or perhaps its centre. The term is used in three dimensional modelling."

Thx to Kaj for looking that up earlier, btw

Jord.

[Storm]

There are too many downsides to voxel rendering (apart from the low image quality, and slow speed). Sure it'd be nice to see Matrox support them in hardware, there just aren't too many applications for them right now. Voxel landscapes have been used in various games.. and voxel rendering software is sometimes used in medical areas for general visualization. Any new feature is nice.. but would you benefit more from hardware voxel rendering, or a much faster polygon rendering pipeline?

(Plus.. Matrox would have another type of a Voxel3D ICD for hardware.. and it'll be version 0.00 at the beginning.. better get that Bug spray )

Hey! We're still speculating on Matrox Hardware so this thread is still on topic

=Storm=

[DuRaNgO]

any thoughts on the possible memory bandwidth of this baby, that could be one of the most important "features" especially for high resolutions...

i.e fcram?

[This message has been edited by DuRaNgO (edited 13 August 2000).]

[Storm]

IMHO, the best thing for any 3d accelerator is to have the ram on the chip itself, at least some amount. It solves any bandwidth problems instantly. Or maybe have the framebuffer on-die, and texture memory as external FCRAM.

As for FCRAM:
http://www.maximumpc.com/content/2000/01/19/10618

Fujitsu claims its FCRAM core technology will attack complex scene rendering by combining both random cycle improvements and multiple internal banks to further drive memory performance forward by more than twice that of today's fastest RAM technology, which includes SDRAM, Rambus, and DDR.

Also..
http://www.fujitsu.co.jp/en/news/2000/06/27.html

There's even a picture of it.

Maybe Fujitsu is onto something with FCRAM.. then again.. Fujitsu? Matrox likes trying out new things, maybe FCRAM is it this time.
Quake 3 at 2048x1536x32 at 80fps anyone?

[This message has been edited by Storm (edited 13 August 2000).]

[Rob M.]

Storm is right, EDRAM is the only way to fly. Forget T&L, put that framebuffer on the chip! Of course I'm sure everyone is working on that.. Imagine a 10mb ondie l2 cache for your cpu...

[Rob M.]

Overlapping triangles and translucent textures both require the card to write to the same location in the framebuffer more than once.

[Pace]

I think this thread is now the joint biggest ever in Matrox Hardware with 213 posts. I wonder who will make the 214th post...

Paul.

[Pace]

I'm still thinking...

Paul.

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