raytracing vs rasterisation

[Svartalf]

Feel free to go spend 20 thousand bucks for a new desktop

If you're not gaming/compiling/massive number crunching, you can get a new NON-X86 desktop for a whoppin' $149: The Beagleboard does it pretty well with an ARM Cortex-A8, which does as well as the eeePC does, but does it with vastly less juice.

[Svartalf]

No, it won't. Re-read the Carmack quote I posted earlier in the context of this statement of yours.

While John's a sharp cookie- he's not the final say on things like this.

He's got good observations, ones that should be listened to and counted into one's evaluation of things.

Unfortunately, one of the go-to guys on the subject, one that has worked for John in the past, worked with RAD on producing their Pixomatic library (Used as the software renderer for UT2k4 and reproduces a DX7 card completely in software...), and now Intel, one Michael Abrash, has a differing position and opinion on the subject.

I'm on the fence, the truth be known, on the subject myself. I know what John's saying there- and it's good and valid. But I also know Abrash is one of the brightest of the bright on the subject in question- and what he wrote is equally good and valid. There IS a threshold where it will be more useful to do software rasterization and ray trace for rendering a scene- and we may be right at that point in time or real close to it now.

[V!NCENT]

Unfortunately, one of the go-to guys on the subject, one that has worked for John in the past, worked with RAD on producing their Pixomatic library (Used as the software renderer for UT2k4 and reproduces a DX7 card completely in software...), and now Intel, one Michael Abrash, has a differing position and opinion on the subject.

I immediately fired up UT2k4 to check this out. I was hugely dissapointed by the image quality. Because he did not use texture filtering! The image quality get's resized every now and then but realtime texture filtering doesn't happen.

I was impressed though by the achievement overall... But nevertheless dissapointing... It's like: Okey we can handle the signals and draw something but don't expect the same quality that you get by far from a dedicated Direct3D 7.x card...

PS: What's up with the 800x600 resolution lock? I have a kickass AMD Phenom 9950 x4, and I am more than able to run the pixomatic rendering with hugely playable framerates but it sucks on my 22 inch widescreen.

[mirv]

ut2k4 is relatively old now, and the software renderer was intended for much older systems - I don't think they had the same performance and image quality expectations for it.

[V!NCENT]

ut2k4 is relatively old now, and the software renderer was intended for much older systems - I don't think they had the same performance and image quality expectations for it.

I was expacting the same texture filtering quality from the OpenGL rendered Quake 2 engine. It turned out to not have any texture filtering at all, although it is said that pixomatic can even run trilinair filtering... But the most important thing is that one can run UT2k4 with accaptable image quality without a graphics card. The only realy critisism I have is the 800x600 resolution lock.

But for everything else the pixomatic renderer kicks ass! ^^,

Are there any other games around that I can try out that use pixomatic 2 and 3?

PS: I mean version 3 only because that version is an implementation of a Direct3D 9.x card.