How it goes down

benjcarson at digitaljunkies.ca benjcarson at digitaljunkies.ca
Fri Apr 26 17:03:52 EDT 2002


Sounds good.  What do you think about the following goals then (sorta in 
order of importance): 

 - fix rasterizer to render all triangle orientations and add z-buffer
 - generalize sdram controller, vgaout, vgafifo_ctrl, rasterizer etc. for 
different resolutions and colour depths (probably requires maximizing memory 
throughput)
 - add normal support to the rasterizer
 - implement vertex lighting/texture mapping
 - add basic 2D support (lines, basic polygons, hardware cursor, etc.)
 - develop a PCI interface, drivers, etc.
 - figure out how to design a board... 

If a couple of us are working on it then we can modularize some of this to 
divide up the work.  In particular, I think we could split the rasterizer up 
into some sub-modules so that each module can be optimized independently. We 
can also easily parallelize part or all of it to double our pixel throughput 
then too.  I think the first few steps should be finished first before 
splitting everything up, because the underlying framework may change when we 
fix the memory controller and fifo. 

What do you think? 

Benj 


Jeff Mrochuk writes: 

> So I've been talking to some video guys.  Basically it works on 3
> levels. 
> 
> API (OpenGL, Direct3d), Drivers, and Hardware 
> 
> Your API talks to your drivers, which tell the API what needs to be done
> in software, and what can be done in hardware. 
> 
> In traditional cards (pre Geforce or so) Texuring and Triangle Raster
> are all that was done in hardware.  Color, lighting, and transfrom was
> all done by the API. Recent cards have added hardware transform and
> lighting, but no current game engines even use them yet. 
> 
> We need to up our memory bandwidth and add texture support, and we've
> got a voodoo. 
> 
> Jeff 
> 
> 
 



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