what's S3 up to

[mgi]

That is if the inventors are still working for S3.

http://www.freshpatents.com/System-and-method-for-shadow-rendering-dt20050127ptan20050017974.php


Is this an algo that needs HW support (for their next card) or is it possible on current HW. I'm not sure I get it, it sounds a bit like doing shadows like deferred lighting, in the sense of working on the 2D surface instead of with the actual geometry.


(sorry if this has been covered elsewhere)

 

[Dave Baumann]

Not having studied it in depth I'm taking a guess that this is an old patent that has only recently been filed as at least one of those works (or at least, did before XMas) for ATI.

 

[Xmas]

Looks like it's about rendering shadow buffers at the same time as rendering the unshadowed scene, and having a table that stores the pixel-in-framebuffer/pixel-in-shadowbuffer relation.

However, this method seems flawed to me. If you only store a Z' value in the shadow buffer where a rendered pixel maps to, you get a sparsely populated shadow buffer so you can't be sure every pixel of an object in shadow is really covered by a pixel from an occluder.

Strangely enough they don't seem to mention the transformation of Z and Z' back to a single space before the comparison.

 

[Megadrive1988]

what is S3 up to? "Destination Films". that is their next-gen DX10 /Direct Next part. (with Shader Model 4.0 ?)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=S3+"destination+films"
http://endian.net/details.asp?ItemNo=3833

Even further down the pipe is S3’s next generation product, internally codenamed “Destination Filmsâ€￾. This product will support next generation pixel and vertex shaders, and offer considerably more performance than DeltaChrome. We’re really looking forward to this product, as it has been built from the ground up for the desktop market. Lets face it, DeltaChrome was initially conceived for the mobile market, and it many places, it shows.

http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?current_section=Hardware&fs_article_id=1182