Recent content by Enbar

I tried to read the patent details but it is Japanese. I suspect from the quote above this would only affect internet multiplayer games if Sony chooses to use it. My best guess is that this is the next logical step of cd keys that we have become familiar with for pc games. But instead of a...

Lets take Doom 3... You can ask Doom 3 to do a show triangle. From this you can see that the expensive shaded surfaces in Doom 3 are culled out very effiently by the engine. However if you look at the stencil shadow passes they result in massive overdraw. To sum things up I'd say Doom...

"Legacy" trilinear uses linear ramping this causes a discontinuous 2nd derivative. If their changes to trilinear smooth out this discontinuity then in theory things could be more appealing to the eye. In addition to looking better this approach would be less expensive since a few less lookups...

That statement is nearly correct, but not quite. With ps2.0 you have the necessary math to easily generate the third component of a tangent space normal map from a 2 component texture map (this is the whole idea behind ati's new 2 component normal map texture compression). So with this in mind...

A Sony rep told me that the 10 hour figure is when the screen is not in use at all (music playback and such). I asked if the 2.5 hour figure was typical for gameplay, but he didn't give a clear answer.

Like Guden Oden said AGP aperture sets the amount of system memory the videocard can use for agp textures. However this memory is mapped into ring 0 at boot time and can not be used for other purposes once it's mapped.

Putting parts of a fb in different memory is part of virtualizing memory (just like virtual memory support on intel/amd where when you run out of memory things get paged out to the harddrive). Tiling is aranging memory to not be linear but "tiled" to reduce cache misses. All modern graphics...

I'm surprised everyone here is so pro TBDR. As time progresses I believe its advantages become less and less. Here are the problems I see with it: + Both Nvidia and ATI are convincing developers to use a zfill pass before doing any complex pixels. For games that do this a TBDR will have...

Here's the real deal... NVIDIA is planning a stock buy out of ATI, and ATI is planning a stock buy out of NVIDIA. Soon they will both own just over 50% of the other. Wonder what happens then... :lol:

I've seen it in many web reviews where nvidia's hardware is called "more flexible" like this one in the conclusion. The reason why Nvidia's hardware is always considered more flexible is because they can have longer shaders. I'm pretty sure no game uses shaders longer than ATI's and I doubt...

It seems as though Doom 3 has a heavy focus on stencil shadows and using a single fragment program on all surfaces to compute global illumination. Halflife 2 on the other hand is known to have many different pixel shaders for different surfaces. It seems as though Doom 3's solution is more...

I voted for more pipelines because it was the closest to what I want, but higher clocks would also help. What I really want is fast pixel shaders and I don't care how they get them. What I'd find useful is being able to cover the whole screen with at least 32 instruction shaders and then a...

MMMmmm, Mmmm. Those were tasty.

Yes, I read somewhere that's how ATI does trig func. I didn't know nvidia was claiming native support for these and I highly doubt they would do these at the same rate as a mad. The best I can imagine they would have is to have implemented these as macros in the hardware. In this case they...

From my understanding of whql it wouldn't stop any of the major cases being discussed on b3d. Whql tests the driver to make sure it passes a bunch of tests for stability and compliance to standards. Shader replacement and app specific optimizations would not get caught by this sort of testing.