On Monday 25 October 2004 11:54, Timothy Miller wrote:
The reprogramability of the FPGA has many advantages, but
reprogramability is not its primary purpose.
But it might turn out to be a reason for it turning into a geek trophy, if the price is not enormously higher than closed-spec cards. You could for example, program real-time sound effects processing into the FPGA and output the samples through a standard sound card.
The enthusiast market is a big market these days.
The picture I have in my head at this time expands on the idea of the
setup engine seen in most GPU's. What I'm thinking is that the setup
engine will be general-purpose-ish CPU with special vector and matrix
instructions. This way, the transformation stage will occur in
"software" executed by a specialized processor. Additionally, the
lighting phase might be done here as well.
The setup engine would produce triangle parameters which are fed to a
rasterizer which does Gouraud shading and texture-mapping. That feeds
pixels into something that handles antialiasing and alpha blending, etc.
I hope you're planning to have a divider available to the rasterizer for perspective interpolation, particularly of textures.