Re: [Mesa3d-users] 3dfx limited to 64x64 textures?

[Piotr S. <a97...@un...>]

Stephen J Baker wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Piotr Sawuk wrote:
> 
> > Piotr Sawuk wrote:
> > >
> > > mesa3.4.2 is great, but now glcthugha does only display
> > > properly if I use -S64x64, while with a bigger texture
> >
> > Sorry, of course I meant 256x256 texture-size limitation...
> 
> Well, I guess you have a Voodoo card - and those have a
> HARDWARE restriction that limits you to 256x256 textures.
> 
> This would be a good time to upgrade.

Actually I was talking about making software compatible
with older hardware (especially at a time where people
wish to play multiplayer 3d-games on some old hardware),
but I guess you're right that down-sampling textures
would be a better choice speed-wise. Of course even then
it would be interesting how to make a mosaic of textures
out of one really huge one in order to at least down-sample
textures on the wall which are really far away...

However, as you seem to be proficient in the area of
3d-cards, I have 2 questions which where bugging me
for a long time:

1) do "other" 3d-cards really have no restriction on
texture-size except for the total amount of textures
per frame? I can't imagine that hardware developers
really learn from past mistakes and thereby I doubt
that all new features they might make up will really
never again need some splitting up of the textures...

2) are there any 3d-cards without this restriction
(which are better than my voodoo3 2000) for the
pci-interface (as opposed to agp which I do not have)?
I haven't seen any pci-3d-cards on sale other than voodoo.
I haven't seen any pci-to-agp-interface...

P