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Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/03/01/17:27:36

Message-ID: <34F9E0CF.FA9802A3@gbrmpa.gov.au>
Date: Mon, 02 Mar 1998 08:27:27 +1000
From: Leath Muller <leathm AT gbrmpa DOT gov DOT au>
Organization: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: James W Sager Iii <sager+@andrew.cmu.edu>
CC: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: The future of graphics programming
References: <6cvn02$6t5 AT netnews DOT hinet DOT net> <MoyL6cO00YUs0BH140 AT andrew DOT cmu DOT edu>

Pet peeve time...

> Um, 20,000 polygons per frame?
> with a minimal speed of 24 fps, this is 400,000 polygons per sec.

The latest Voodoo II architecture (yes, HW accelerated) does 3 million
poly's a second - easily... so the figure of 400,000 is not high. I
have a demo here which runs on a 3Dfx Voodoo 1 card at 1.16 Million
poly's per second - and the CPU does all the transforms.

> A fast pentium processeor does about 2-4 mil instructions per second.

Ummm... no... :)  It depends completely on what your doing, but for
basic integer work which is properly pipelined you can get well in
excess of 600 MIPS on P2's - you can get 300 MIPS on a crappy P166.
(Even though MIPS are the worst presentation of performance anywhere)
Quake performs perspective correct texture mapping every 8 pixels
with affine mapping in the sub-spans to run at about 7.5 cycles per
pixel. I get about 34 FPS on my P166 which is theoretically impossible
by your figures.

> So like if you could put a polygon down 1/10 as fast as you could do a basic
> additoion problem this is feasable. But with with current hardware
> constraints, we can do maybe 1/10000 as fast... 3 orders of magnitude.
> I don't forsee computers becoming that much more fast in the next couple
> years. I mean I'd like faster software than allegro. I mean, who doesn't
> want faster software, the simple fact is that no one has done it, so I
> just work with what I got.

Your must be working on a 386 @ 8 Mhz... ;)

Leathal.

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