From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@istop.com>
To: Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>
Subject: Re: Some discussion points open source friendly graphics [was: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable?]
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:38:30 -0400
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On Monday 25 October 2004 11:54, Timothy Miller wrote:
> The reprogramability of the FPGA has many advantages, but
> reprogramability is not its primary purpose.

But it might turn out to be a reason for it turning into a geek trophy, if the 
price is not enormously higher than closed-spec cards.  You could for 
example, program real-time sound effects processing into the FPGA and output 
the samples through a standard sound card.

The enthusiast market is a big market these days.

> The picture I have in my head at this time expands on the idea of the
> setup engine seen in most GPU's.  What I'm thinking is that the setup
> engine will be general-purpose-ish CPU with special vector and matrix
> instructions.  This way, the transformation stage will occur in
> "software" executed by a specialized processor.  Additionally, the
> lighting phase might be done here as well.
>
> The setup engine would produce triangle parameters which are fed to a
> rasterizer which does Gouraud shading and texture-mapping.  That feeds
> pixels into something that handles antialiasing and alpha blending, etc.

I hope you're planning to have a divider available to the rasterizer for 
perspective interpolation, particularly of textures.

Regards,

Daniel
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