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Voxel/Polygon Accelerator

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the allright-thats-pretty-interesting dept.

G. Waters writes: "Ars Technica writes that "3DLabs and Real Time Visualization have teamed up to design an accelerator that accelerates both voxels and polygons in the same scene." A link to the announcement can be found here. Perhaps voxels will become more mainstream with similar developments." I'm still waiting for the cards with accelerated bezier patches, but this is cool too. *grin*

3 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Voxel, for those that don't know.. by eval · · Score: 5
    That definition is only partially correct. Unfortunately, it falls into one of the oldest mental traps of the graphics world, thinking of pixels as squares and voxels as cubes.

    Pixels and voxels are zero-dimensional samples of some 2D image or 3D volume. Thinking about them as squares, gaussian splats, or something other than samples is the path to the Dark Side.

    For more info, read Alvy Ray Smith's Tech Memo, "A Pixel is Not a Little Square, a Pixel is Not a Little Square, a Pixel is Not a Little Square! (And a Voxel is Not a Little Cube)" available here.

  2. What's an accelerated bezier patch ? by Salsaman · · Score: 5

    Is it something that helps you give up smoking quicker ?

  3. Re:An honest question... by Evangelion · · Score: 5


    Pose the question like this : are raster graphics somehow superior to vector graphics?

    At one point, video games were done with vector graphics (Tempest was the most memorable =) beacuse raster graphics were too expensive computationally to do. Once they were possible, much more freedom was allowed.

    Polygons are basically vector graphics in 3d - an approximation generated by drawing lines through space to simulate the construction of objects. Whereas voxels are much more like pixels - you choose a resolution, and then you fill in each 3d point with a colour. They are just orders of magnitude more expensive than polygons, that's all.

    The advantages? More freedom and realisim in what can be designed.

    --