Re: TurboRez news

[jlee@ics.uci.edu (Orion Pax)]

Steve Reeves (stever@news.gate.net) wrote:
: Here is some interesting info about the TurboRez, from a file recently
: uploaded to GEnie's A2 RT.

[ blip ]
: The Second Sight card's strongest suite is when it's coupled to an
: external SVGA monitor. Here it offers some pretty high resolution, up to
: 1076 by 768 pixels. Of course, to effectively take advantage of this,
: you'll really need a 17 or 19 inch monitor to avoid eyestrain (Price a

Not really.  My roommate has a 15" Viewsoniq and I do fine in 1024x768 mode.
Of course if that's an eyestrain to some, 800x600 is still pretty good.  I
do wish that TR supported resolutions beyond 640x480 as that 640x480
was good back a few years ago, but not serious enough now to do any form
of graphics intensive applications, such as a windows environment.

[blip]
: second in the resolution department. TurboRez is capable of doing
: overscan, however (vertical and horizontal, together or separately).

What is the advantage to having overscan exactly?

[blip]
: them move and flow. Well, the TurboRez card enhances animation on the GS
: with a host of features. First, of course, the high-speed  Blitter for
: drawing shapes and objects to the display very quickly. Add to that its

Having a high-speed blitter means nothing over the 1 mhz I/O bottleneck.
Therefore I assume you mean blitting on board.  So how much memory is
there that can be used to cache image data for blitting?

[blip]
: The Multi-Plane hardware on the TurboRez card is similar in concept to the
: multi-plane techniques used by commercial film animators. Basically, it

How many layers are there now?  Previous press releases put the layers
from 8 to something like 4 last.  Getting back to 8 or more would be really
nice. =)

[blip]
: The other major animation enhancer is the Line Drawing w/Scaling hardware.
: Here we take a common operation like plotting a line of pixels and couple
: it with Scaling logic. Scaling allows magnifying or shrinking a bitmapped
: shape or object as it's being drawn. The scaling operation can be done by

Sounds great. :) 

[blip]
: To get a good idea of how effective this technique is, find somebody with
: a 486 PC (50 or 66 mhz) that has the popular program "Doom" and have them
: run it for you. Now, we at RezTek aren't advocating that all games should
: imitate the shoot-em up premise of Doom, but our purpose here is to
: examine the implementation of a realtime, 3D texture mapped universe in
: which the user can move about freely and interact with. The effect is
: quite impressive and realistic. Now imagine something similar running on

Doom isn't texture mapping nor raycasting.  Both would be still quite slow
even on a 486/66.  It's something else from the discussions going on in
comp.graphics.algorithms.  If, however we can still simulate that same 3d
effect with the 360 degree free-movement of Origin's System Shock, that
would present quite a bit of interesting possibilities, like a 3d file
navigator or something.

[blip]

Well, this is not a flame just this was about as ambigious in distinct
information as Reagon is.  I guess there are reasons for this being a
trades secrets type war right now.

It would've been nice if Sequential and Reztek got together to do a
video card.  That way, the rest of us can have our cake and eat it too.

Ja,
Joseph
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