[rescue] ZX coolness

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 01:34:00AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Monday, October 7, 2002, at 11:50 PM, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> >I just came across a document titled "SPARCstation10ZX and SPARCstation
> >ZX Graphics Technology White Paper" from Sun.  According to this, the 
> >ZX
> >board tesselates trimmed NURBS surfaces in hardware.  Way cool.  Off 
> >the
> >type of my head, the only other graphics board that does that is the IR
> >line in Onyxs.
> 
>   Sounds cool to me.
> 
>   Got time for an English translation?

Yeah, my file system is correcting the errors caused by crashing (note,
I doubt it is linux's fault, but rather I blame it on the hardware
makers.  Especially the video card one who refused to use standard
drivers or userlang drivers, but instead had to supply proprietary
drivers as a kernel module).

OK.  I'm not sure what the adjective trimmed means when applied to
NURBS.  As a major NURBS fan, Kurt might be able to answer tht.  But,
apparently it makes NURBS far more complicated to calculate.

So, we have a hard to calculate parametric surface (meaning that the
surface is defined by a mathematical function rather that lots of little
triangles or quads).  The usual way to display it would be to have
software run on the CPU that goes and turns that surface into a long
list of triangles.  This list could be saved to be used again, as long
as the surface doesn't change (which is going to be often if running a
CAD program, probably), then the list has to be recalculated.  

So, what the ZX board does is rather than the host CPU calculate the
triangulation, the board can do it itself, leaving the CPU to worry
about other things.  The only other case of graphics hardware that I
know of that does that is Infinate Reality (although it would surprise
me if Impact did also).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd