[rescue] Weird Silicon Graphics o2 graphics issues

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 07:32:50PM -0400, Nathan Raymond wrote:

> Someday in the not-too distant future that will be standard.  SGI is
> already doing Phong shading in hardware, so today's Gouraud based shading
> is going to look dated soon enough.

>From what I've seen, SGI is the only one doing phong shading in
hardware.  The other vendors do it in shaders (alright, that's splitting
hairs).  Seriously, my understanding is that phong on a VPro card
requires adding all of two lines of code to your application, while
phone on a shader system involves picking which of several incompatible
shader languages to use (all of which appear to be hardware specific),
then writing a phone algorithm in the shader language, compiling it, and
adding lots of support code to your application for downloading the
shader, activating it, etc.

Hardware shaders are extremely cool, but I'm not certain that they are
really the best plan for most application writers.