Single pass trilinear?

parhelia

Newcomer
I hear some companies are touting they support "single pass trilinear filtering" aka "fast trilinear".
Hasn't trilinear filtering always been done in one pass? I remember 3dfx already tout the Voodoo3 as supporting "single pass trilinear filtering".
Wassup with this new trilinear? Who supports some sort of fast trilinear and how did they do it?
 
parhelia said:
I hear some companies are touting they support "single pass trilinear filtering" aka "fast trilinear".
Hasn't trilinear filtering always been done in one pass? I remember 3dfx already tout the Voodoo3 as supporting "single pass trilinear filtering".
Wassup with this new trilinear? Who supports some sort of fast trilinear and how did they do it?

In the consumer market it really hasn't been the case (as opposed to, say, a full blown workstation). IIRC, V3 used its dual (bilinear) texturing hardware in order to do trilinear in one cycle. It therefore would not be able to do simultaneous multi-texuring and trilinear filtering. I believe most other systems tended to do it as two bilinear steps.

When you read "fast trilinear", it probably implies either
  • using a variant of S3's scheme whereby the next lower map is assumed to have been generated from its parent by using 2x2 box filters. The system then generates lower map pixels "on the fly" and thus only needs to read one texture level to perform a trilinear filter operation. OR
  • Using MIP-map dithering
 
parhelia said:
I hear some companies are touting they support "single pass trilinear filtering" aka "fast trilinear".
Hasn't trilinear filtering always been done in one pass? I remember 3dfx already tout the Voodoo3 as supporting "single pass trilinear filtering".
Wassup with this new trilinear? Who supports some sort of fast trilinear and how did they do it?
Hehe, i'm waiting for TMU's which can output 16x trilinear anisotropic filtered texels in a single pass. :)
 
I believe most other systems tended to do it as two bilinear steps.

Even today's high end cards perform dual cycle trilinear. The S3 DeltaChrome claims single cycle trilinear, but I'm not sure yet how exactly they do it.

You guys had fast trilinear on Series3, yet it was operative only with TC enabled. I recall though preferring in most cases a 2xSSAA/bilinear combo back then <shrugs>.

Hehe, i'm waiting for TMU's which can output 16x trilinear anisotropic filtered texels in a single pass.

Uh oh Exxtreme, that's a bit far fetched for the time being, don't you think? ;)
 
Savage 2D and 4 could do trilinear for free. Unfortunately the Savage 2000 could not. It would not be unreasonable to guess that Delta Chrome would not use the 2D core from previous savage cards or that it would impliment trilinear filtering in a mannor similar fashon to savage 3d and 4.
 
Parhelia can do Dual texture with single pass trilinear filtering. thanks to it's monstrous amount of texturing units.

(yeah yeah, I know, I know. it's crappy, expensive, and no good for any one. But that doesn't mean it would have anything good.)
 
Nappe1 said:
Parhelia can do Dual texture with single pass trilinear filtering. thanks to it's monstrous amount of texturing units.

(yeah yeah, I know, I know. it's crappy, expensive, and no good for any one. But that doesn't mean it would have anything good.)

That's not what I would have said; the first thought was, why on God's green earth "with the monstrous amount of TMUs" is it incapable of single cycle trilinear with quad texturing.... (I know it's combining TMUs for the record).
 
Ailuros said:
Nappe1 said:
Parhelia can do Dual texture with single pass trilinear filtering. thanks to it's monstrous amount of texturing units.

(yeah yeah, I know, I know. it's crappy, expensive, and no good for any one. But that doesn't mean it would have anything good.)

That's not what I would have said; the first thought was, why on God's green earth "with the monstrous amount of TMUs" is it incapable of single cycle trilinear with quad texturing.... (I know it's combining TMUs for the record).

at least you got me writing down my thoughts about all PC-gaming right now: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=207755#207755
 
oeLangOetan said:
Hehe, i'm waiting for TMU's which can output 16x trilinear anisotropic filtered texels in a single pass. :)

The deltachrome S8 can do it
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/s3-deltachrome.html

i think those AF benches are wrong. I seem to remember that somebody mentioned that AF only works if it's enabled through the application and doesn't work at all if it is forced through the ControlPanel on deltachrome with the current drivers.

And i think in both ut2003 and halo they forced AF through the CP and thus AF isn't working and that's why you see no performance drop.
 
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