remember when they said the G400 could have TnL?

[drzaius]

im not sure if this was just rumor or could astually be done, but what they said was they could change some of the registery thingies and give the G400 some kind of TnL support, it was going to be crappy but they said they could do it (rumor, im not sure)

but if they can do this, then the G550 has a lot of these things doesn't it? 250+? couldn't they tweak them around a bit, get ride of the headcasting thing and make a half decent gaming card?

BTW im an offical Murcer now

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Slow people are easy to pass, it's people who drive fast that are hard.

[DuRaNgO]

First off, congrats!

Yes, it will be on the next card which is said to be for pure gaming

[rylan]

I posted this in another thread, but it applies here too... why would Matrox bother trying to force their crippled HW T&L engine to do extra stuff for games, when this is obviously not a gaming card. You need memory bandwidth for T&L, which the G550 absolutely does not have. It would take quite a bit of work to try to reassign those registers through the driver to try an look like a full HW T&L engine, which will be slower than letting your GHz+ cpu do the T&L work (this isn't a programmable T&L engine guys, its a partial HW T&L engine thats crippled).

I'm sure you won't want their driver team trying to do this, as they'll have enough problems getting their D3D and OpenGL drivers to get the card up to G400MAX speeds.

[Ali]

I read the Headcasting engine is just a RISC prosessor. That means it should be quite easy to reprogram, it just depends on what instructions are available to it.

Im guessing they got rid of the WARP engine, and made that part of the Headcasting one, so they should have all the instructions available for triangle setup, which means the have INC,DEC,BNEQ,CPI etc as standard.

Anybody with enough time on there hands could reprogram it as long as they could get a list of the instructions and register locations.

I would love to have a play. Ive only ever used ATMEL microprossesors, but the assembly should be similar anyway.

Then again, I would have to read up on 3d math, and Im not sure if I can be bothered.

Ali

[drzaius]

well im glad i got some kind of reponse, i wasn't sure if i made it up or not

i dont think matrox should or would waste their time tring to get their business class card up to high-end 3d monster.

but it's something else to think about.

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Slow people are easy to pass, it's people who drive fast that are hard.

[ALBPM]

Who the heck wants "Tilt n Lick" support for "Butt Casting".....LOL

Paul

[DuRaNgO]

you have to ask?