Re: Some discussion points open source friendly graphics [was: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable?]

[Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>]

Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On Monday 25 October 2004 11:54, Timothy Miller wrote:
> 
>>The reprogramability of the FPGA has many advantages, but
>>reprogramability is not its primary purpose.
> 
> 
> But it might turn out to be a reason for it turning into a geek trophy, if the 
> price is not enormously higher than closed-spec cards.  You could for 
> example, program real-time sound effects processing into the FPGA and output 
> the samples through a standard sound card.
> 
> The enthusiast market is a big market these days.
> 
> 
>>The picture I have in my head at this time expands on the idea of the
>>setup engine seen in most GPU's.  What I'm thinking is that the setup
>>engine will be general-purpose-ish CPU with special vector and matrix
>>instructions.  This way, the transformation stage will occur in
>>"software" executed by a specialized processor.  Additionally, the
>>lighting phase might be done here as well.
>>
>>The setup engine would produce triangle parameters which are fed to a
>>rasterizer which does Gouraud shading and texture-mapping.  That feeds
>>pixels into something that handles antialiasing and alpha blending, etc.
> 
> 
> I hope you're planning to have a divider available to the rasterizer for 
> perspective interpolation, particularly of textures.


My plans are not quite that specific at this time.  For instance, I'm 
not entirely sure, yet, how perspective correction is done.