From: jet@karazm.math.uh.edu ("J. Eric Townsend")
Subject: Re: Plea for help
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 1991 17:18:33 GMT
Message-ID: <1991Jan19.171833.5645@lavaca.uh.edu>
Organization: University of Houston -- Department of Mathematics


In article <14747@milton.u.washington.edu> kdarling@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Kevin Darli
ng) writes:
>What kind of precomputed screens?  Do you mean previously created
>delta animations?  Would those be useful in a changing VR display?

They would be useful in a canned demo.  If you computed your graphics
on a transputer board (for instance) and sent a delta bitstream,
I'd imagine you could see 15-20fps of a simple scene.  I'm not
really up on how fast a 4 node T800 board can render, so don't hold
me to that.

>And I don't understand the magical qualities people _always_ assign
>to blitters :-).

Well, I'm still (mentally) in the age of "slow CPU, fast graphics" == good.
My Amiga, our TAAC-equipped Sun, etc.  I'm sure that if I had a 1K NCUBE
with framebuffer that I wouldn't mind not having graphics hardware. :-)

This is probably more along the lines of comp.graphics, but has
anybody looked into which is better?  VPL uses their hacked cards,
we use a TAAC (and soon, a SS-2GS), and the Commodore 64 uses hardware
sprites. :-)  Is anyone using a just *fast* CPU and a simple framebuffer?

--
J. Eric Townsend     Internet: jet@uh.edu    Bitnet: jet@UHOU
Systems Mangler - UH Dept. of Mathematics - (713) 749-2120
Motorola skates on Intel's head!