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

Timothy Miller
2004-10-29T15:47:19Z

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.