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

Daniel Phillips
2004-10-27T18:44:35Z

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.

Regards,

Daniel