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Matrox
Mystique |
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| Matrox,
designer of excellent consumer based 2-D boards in the
past, has come up with a fine 3-D game board ASIC as
well. The Mystique approaches the problem of rendering complex scenes dozens of times per second in a unique fashion. Their ASIC specializes in performing color lookups for and decompressing complex, compressed textures, as opposed to performing complex tasks on simplistic, large textures. When implemented properly, the effect is extremely fast performance, as the chip can concentrate more on "fill" rate rather than fancy texturing calculations. Matrox has been criticized a bit for not specifically including bi-linear filtering. When you look at the chip's features, you're hard-pressed to think of another standard 3-D feature it doesn't support. Unfortunately, the absence of bi-linear filter support is occasionally noticeable, and it's up to each user to decide whether the lack of this feature is important. | Matrox Mystique | |
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| ATI
Rage II |
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| The
second-generation 3-D game chip from ATI supports an
incredible number of features. Unfortunately, some
aspects of this chip simply don't move quickly enough. This chip does not lack for features. First, it supports six perspective-correct texture mapping functions, sub-pixel and sub-texel accuracy, multiple texel and pixel formats, bi-linear texture mapping, and MIP mapping. Of course, Gouraud shading, z-buffering, alpha blending, and fog effects come standard. There's no question that all these features allow for very attractive gameplay. Unfortunately, with the titles we tried, the conclusion was the same: looks good, plays slowly. |
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| NEC/VideoLogic
PowerVR |
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| The PowerVR
boasts an entirely unique architecture that, with a fast
enough computer, truly works. First, it features an "image-synthesis processor," a chip that executes a technique called "hidden surface removal." This means that, for each frame, during the geometry set-up stage, the polygons that will be hidden (that, say, were visible in the frame before) will be removed before rendering takes place. Most other chips use a z-buffer, an extra bit attached to each pixel identifying it's location on the screen along the z-axis. Not only does this mean extra bits on each polygon, but those hidden shapes will also be rendered; they only get "hidden" at the final "fill" stage. The second part of the ASIC is a "texture and shading processor," which acts just as it sounds, shading and adding textures to the polygons supplied by the image synthesis processor. NEC/VideoLogic is most proud, though, of the product's scalability, as board vendors can add as many image synthesis processors as they like. | Apocalypse VR | |
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