[dumb/wannby's nerd topic] Why not a CF 3D card?

[ToTTenTranz]

Well.. like we say in my country:

You can't make an omollete without breaking some eggs first..


All 3d engines for ppc games available right now are optimized for software rendering.. and software renders don't stand a chance against hardware accelerated ones..

[Maledorito]

Don't forget, some PPC's are designed with gaming in mind (Casio's button layout and good D-pad).

You can tell that a lot of PPC's are not meant for gaming when you try it in landscape mode, the controls are horrible! 8O

[damian]

Riiight... CAD on a PPC. That's sure a big incentive for 3D acceleration.

Which, in case you were wondering, requires quite a bit of wattage. So does an FPU.

Allow me to illustrate:

[Rizlo+]

That's all good and serious points...
My idea is about 3D CF card with low power consumption chips and really simple as powervr1 or even more simple accelerators just before 3dfx era with limitated bandwitdh, they could be surely better for gaming and 3D than simple ARM processor that makes most games after doom/hexen era to run like a crap. I didn't mean something like geforce2 level nor even voodoo1!!! It could really help in most situations

PowerVR is compatible direct3d, so it wouldn't be necessary to write proprietay PVR routines but something like a port of direct3d, so next ipaq are really promising

Please tell me more about PCMCIA 3d accelerator with software they could work on PPCs?

[James S]

I didn't know crap could run

Actually, Geforce2Go consumes less power and produces less heat than a Voodoo1 level graphics card. And if we did put some pre-Voodoo level graphics card in there you or someone like you would just start whining that it's not fast enough and what's the point.

[Entity]

I'd say it's entirely possible. If the SuperFX chip built onto SNES cartridges could speed up games with limited bus bandwidth, so could a FPP (floating point processor), dedicated to performing floating point calculations built onto a CF card, or even into something which will go into the SD slot. This should bring full-speed Quake quality graphics.

[damian]

[damian]

[James S]

It isn't even 3D, is it? It's just perspective corrected triangles.

[Guest]

PPC 3D games are a way better than starfox on almost any PPC round here, he say about superFX just for example on low bandwith chip acceleration
Would an FPU co-processor(on CF) speed-up PPCs even with CF card bus?

[Presto]

Yep, Moose, Starfox is 3D. The perspective-corrected triangles are placed and sized on the 2D screen based on a third co-ordinate (Z). Once you add that Z dimension to X and Y, it becomes 3D. (Graphically at least.)

If you're at 200,200,100 (X,Y,Z) and there's a missile at 200,200,300... You and that missile are still 200 units apart thanks to that third dimension.

Back on topic, I don't really see any way the CF, SD, etc slots could manage an effective bandwidth to be of assistance in gaming. 240x320x2 = 153,600 bytes per screen. Take that times 30fps and you'd need to pump 4,608,000 bytes per second from the card to the device, unless it was transmitted in a digital format. But then you still have all of the overhead of performing processing on the device's CPU and communicating information upstream to the card before it can send anything back. Possibly if the card acted like an ultra-smart game cartridge, doing all of the processing, and only needing to receive the input from the D-Pad, buttons and stylus to use for calculations... All the device would have to do then would be to draw the data on the screen and send those inputs. But to create such a card couldn't be cost effective.

[damian]

[Dave H]

[James S]

[SiGen]