D3DFableMark is a benchmark program featuring a puppet theatre in which a well-known fable, "The Hare and the Tortoise", is performed. Every object in the scene has soft-edged shadows projected onto the stage background and the rendering of these accurate shadows form the basis of this benchmark.
All shadows in D3DFableMark are soft-edged, and are rendered using the hardware stencil buffer. The CPU uses the light position and the model for each object to calculate multiple shadow volumes. The scene is rendered in multiple passes; first the scene is rendered using ambient lighting, which also prepares the depth buffer for stencil lighting. Then the shadow volumes are submitted and the contribution from each light source to each soft-edge volume is summed into the scene. Finally, the scene is rendered once again, this time modulating the textures by the results of the previous passes. The final result is a relatively high polygon count scene with approximately 95% of the polygons being translucent.
PowerVR's Z32[TM] technology enables KYRO to process the invisible polygons that affect the stencil buffer exceptionally fast, giving KYRO a significant performance advantage in situations where multiple stencil buffer accesses are required. PowerVR's ConstantStencil[TM] enables the benchmark to be run at any colour depths on KYRO cards whereas most other video cards must use 32 bits mode for their stencil buffer to be available. Finally PowerVR's Internal True Colour[TM] means no colour degradation occurs in 16 bits mode, which is not the case with other graphic cards.
