Re: [utah-glx-dev] [rather long] Pb with the ATI RageIIC

[Frank E. <fe...@ai...>]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, you wrote:

> Well, the hardware's doing the span rendering.  Paul Nettle has a pretty
> good justification of hardware-accelerated spanbuffering on his site,
> graphicspapers.com (look for the S-buffer HOWTO).  Well, he used to.  I
> can't seem to find it anymore.  A websearch on "Paul Nettle S-buffer"
> should turn it up though.

Ah, S-buffering.  I read Paul's article- it makes for an interesting read.

Try this URL:

	http://www.cstone.net/~kyoung/sbuf_faq.html

It's a copy of the original that was lying about on graphicspapers.com (That
site had a meltdown in recent times so it's not quite up to speed right now...)

Jacco Bikker, a pretty good engine developer had some mussings about  S-buffers
for occlusion detection in an engine to avoid submitting stuff to the rendering
pipeline that wouldn't ever get rendered. Here's the URL for the tutorial:

	http://www.flipcode.com/tutorials/tut_visibility02.shtml

In it, he implies that S-buffers, while they're a way to do occlusion
detection, etc., they are an expensive (compute-wise) proposition, especially
in complex scenes.  I don't think he was expecting hardware to do that
(Although, I've been thinking about that- hardware might make the difference
there and you could concievably ditch Z-buffering and use hardware assisted
S-buffering instead.)


-- 
Frank Earl