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With NVIDIA banking on T&L, 3dfx on their T-Buffer what about S3? Their main beef seems to be with increasing frame rates and especially in games that make use of multitexturing techniques. The Savage 2000 3D engine will sport perhaps this industry's first dual pixel/dual texture pipeline, though 3dfx [and the bitboys?]is also rumored to be doing something similar. This is great news for Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament fans. Frame rates in these two games and indeed any other using multi-texturing rendering
techniques, should (in theory) increase quite significantly and be more efficient than other/older single pixel/dual texture 3D architectures. On paper, S3's decision to use single clock four texel architecture looks really sensible. For a visual explanation see the flow-chart below:
Another new addition to S3 3D architecture will be their QuadTexture engine. A spin-off of the Dual Pixel/Dual Texture pipeline, Quad Texturing will give game developers the tools necessary to improve upon image quality further. With so many games in 2000 also set to use multi-texturing and four picture elements per pixel becoming a 'standard', it makes room for a main texture, detail texture, bump and lighting maps so all the decorative aspects for a pixel can go through the pipe in one cycle The ability to compose four textures in a single cycle is certainly intriguing. We're unsure as to the support for this feature as yet though.
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