Warp engine

[atko]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by CHHAS:
Doesn't it do the EMBM ?</font>

Ehh...
EMBM and Dot3 are perpixel effects. WARP engine is a geometrical processing unit. You can't do rasterization with a geometrical unit.

[red2]

The WARP engine is really a mini, programmable, CPU. It can probably be used to do almost anything, but it isn't fast enough. If it has trouble just doing the triangle setup, imagine how it would choke doing something requiring a lot more horsepower.

[Nuno]

EvilDonnyboy, don´t mess triangle setup with hardware T&L. Every 3D card has 100% hardware triangle setup since the Voodoo 1.

[dZeus]

maybe it's a stupid idea of me, but isn't it possible that Matrox program the WARP with drivers so that they can fix certain hardware flaws in the G400 core? Of course no graphics core is bugfree, and this would be a neat way to work around bugs. It would also explain why you can't find the specifications about what it does anywhere.

Of course if the WARP engine isn't flexible/designed to do this, then I'm completely wrong about it's functionality

[atko]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Nuno:
EvilDonnyboy, don´t mess triangle setup with hardware T&L. Every 3D card has 100% hardware triangle setup since the Voodoo 1.</font>

Triangle setup is a hardware tessellation stuff. It means that it makes triangles from the higher level faces/lines like curved lines. It is needed because todays 3D cards can handle only straight lines and triangles they can't do anything with curved lines and surfaces...
So it is a geometrical unit, but its functionality is very limited.

[EvilDonnyboy]

Uh, where exactly did I "mess" triangle setup with T&L?

[franklar]

according to me Warp engine isn't used at all:
just get MGAtweak and clock Warp at 33 Mhz with every GCLK and MCLK: now make a benchmark. Well, then overclock Warp even to 180 Mhz and repeat the benchmark:
there's no difference in results, independently by the bench you choose to execute.

[Nuno]

The way you put "why is the G400 so FPU hungry?" "because of a Triangle Setup engine that wasn't 100% done in hardware.".

G400 isn´t that fpu hungry, but when it showed up the drivers aren´t quite up to par with the competition (to much overhead?). That´s why the G400 liked a fast cpu so much.

The point I was trying to make was that the G400 has a 100% triangle setup engine, as all modern 3d cards.