ATI vs Matrox Environmental Bump mapping

[Dionysis]

WAKE UP GUYS!!!!! and LEARN HOW TO READ

ATI'S new card supports all kinds of bump mapping technics...including hardware EMBM..

just go

http://www.ati.com/na/pages/showcase/radeon/techspecs.html

[Kruzin]

Take your own advice, and LEARN TO READ. After you do that, go back and read this thread again.
The question is not wether or not it does EMBM. We already know it does. The question is HOW it does it, compaired to how G400 does it.

[Himself]

I agree RobM, that would be retarded in the extreme, I can see some demo hacker doing something like that but not a company casting it into hardware.

[Storm]

Rob M.,
That's true, but as textures become higher resolution and the usage of EMBM increases, it wouldn't hurt so save Some extra bandwidth. Although you're right, it wouldn't make a Huge difference. Nevertheless, this is the graphics market, every extra fps counts.

I would have to disagree about the texture limitations however. It would depend on the type of texture you are using. *Most* common textures don't need an extra bump map. Unless you are making a specific bumpmap, which Has to be different than the texturemap, having a separate one is useless. Remember, we're going for realtime here, not quality rendering. (Besides, since when did ATI care about Quality?)

I'd think ATI would leave some options to developers. I'm *guessing* you can choose whether or not you want to use ATI's method for EMBM. It would be incredibly retarded if they forced you to to use their way of programming it.

Himself,
We're talking about ATI. Whether or not this is what they did, that feature isn't particularly hard to impliment as I said earlier.. But, it would require an ATI card to use. I'm just saying HOW they might've done it. I don't personally think it's That useful however. New ideas are always welcome... as long as they don't increase the price of the hardware.

Unless someone from ATI cares to comment on the specifics of their EMBM implimentation, this topic isn't going to get too far, and until we see some REAL benchmarks of ATI Radeon vs. GeForce2, we don't even know how good of a card it is.. especially given ATI's rather grim history.

=Storm=

[This message has been edited by Storm (edited 02 May 2000).]