Ailuros
04-26-01, 10:24 AM
Billy - Ok, the "next" holy grail in visuals, what do we need to see the hardware manufacturers do? They seemed to have really done a lot with the GeForce 3, but, of course, more needs to be done. What are some of the key areas that need to be focused on / added / etc. for, what I would assume be the GeForce 4, to really bring us to the "next level"?
Carmack - My critical issue list has stayed constant for a while:
Higher precision color formats.
Solving the temporary problem.
Flexible dependent texture reads.
Virtualized graphics address space.
I am confident that we will be getting 64 bit color formats in some cards next year.
It doesn't seem like there is a wonderful solution to the temporary problem, but next gen cards are going to have enough temporaries that dropping back to full screen buffers (possibly with software tiling or striping) for the overflow cases may be reasonable.
The dependent texture reads are there in GF3 if you degenerate to simple rendering. I expect next generation hardware to have completely flexible implementations.
Virtualizing the graphics address space seems to be gated on Microsoft's unwillingness to properly fix the AGP interface and management. I think they should go ahead and do it even if they can only use 66mhz PCI reads for it, but that is clearly suboptimal.
John Carmack
after Sweeney's comments on the next generation vga's I thought Carmack's opinion on the same issue should be mentioned too.
Carmack - My critical issue list has stayed constant for a while:
Higher precision color formats.
Solving the temporary problem.
Flexible dependent texture reads.
Virtualized graphics address space.
I am confident that we will be getting 64 bit color formats in some cards next year.
It doesn't seem like there is a wonderful solution to the temporary problem, but next gen cards are going to have enough temporaries that dropping back to full screen buffers (possibly with software tiling or striping) for the overflow cases may be reasonable.
The dependent texture reads are there in GF3 if you degenerate to simple rendering. I expect next generation hardware to have completely flexible implementations.
Virtualizing the graphics address space seems to be gated on Microsoft's unwillingness to properly fix the AGP interface and management. I think they should go ahead and do it even if they can only use 66mhz PCI reads for it, but that is clearly suboptimal.
John Carmack
after Sweeney's comments on the next generation vga's I thought Carmack's opinion on the same issue should be mentioned too.