Re: FW: XFree86 future

On Friday 28 March 2003 16:09, Marco Bubke wrote:
> What do you mean by real time?

I mean that sometimes texture data has to be sent to the card in the middle of 
a frame. Obviously, the faster the bus, the faster that data can be sent. 
when rendering a large environment, you can quite easily fill up the texture 
memory, so you need to get rid of textures you can't see and load in ones you 
can. Same with model data and so on, especially if it involves a lot of 
animations.

> > Oh yeah, rendering to textures. That's another way to flood the AGP bus.
>
> Why. Thats stupid. If you render to texture you render to the memory of the
> card. Otherwise you could use glReadPixels. Maybe you
> should read the Überbuffer draft and Real Time Rendering.

It depends what you want to do with it. Some feedback routines require the 
rendering take place to a buffer, then it be sent back through the bus to be 
processed, then send it back to the card to be rendered.

Quite a lot of this is solvable by having a fully programmable GPU.

--jaa