Does this mean no T&L for Matrox in future??

[Maniac]

http://www.matrox.com/mga/feat_story...isconcepts.htm

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Celeron 300A@464 2.0V, Abit BH6 G400 16meg DH@150/200, Western Digital Expert 18gig, Ricoh mp7040A, Pioneer 6X DVD slot load, Motorola Cable Modem w/DEC ethernet card, Soundblaster Live Value Ver. 2, Viewsonic GT 775

[Kruzin]

How do you get that out of the article?
They point out that EMBM and T&L are not competing techs. To me, this says that T&L has benefits of it own, and so does EMBM. With both features having their own set of benefits, it seems like there would be good reason to add T&L to a future product...

[Himself]

That's what I read to, why even mention they don't conflict if you are not going to be doing a product where it would become an issue?

[LAMFDTK]

I didnt get that from the article. but its funny that Matrox keep insisting that Messiah is going to use EMBM and Shiny has said on numerous site that they are not. I hope they do use it.

[Maniac]

The article states that to render a scene using T&L would be very inefficient and a waste of resources. Doing the same in EMBM would require only a few hours of work and would be good enough to fool the eye. Am I missing something? I'm not sure what your respective positions are on this. Your posts were ambiguous at best...

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Celeron 300A@464 2.0V, Abit BH6 G400 16meg DH@150/200, Western Digital Expert 18gig, Ricoh mp7040A, Pioneer 6X DVD slot load, Motorola Cable Modem w/DEC ethernet card, Soundblaster Live Value Ver. 2, Viewsonic GT 775

[Buuri]

No it doesn't say that. It says that there is no way that those two are competing with each other, while EMBM is superior in adding fine detail and T&L giving tools to increase overall polygon complexity.

For example, the large amount of triangles supported by hardware T&L would allow the nose or the skeletal features of a character’s face to be modeled with great precision. EMBM would then be used to add stubble, goose bumps, porous skin, freckles and even sweat. Likewise, if T&L were used to model the curves of a sports car, EMBM would then be used to add mud, rust and scratches—details that would drain a developer’s polygon budget if attempted with T&L.

While some of these details could be added using extra geometry, the time spent modeling such detail is impractical for any developer and would be a terrible waste of precious polygons.

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B

[This message has been edited by Buuri (edited 19 November 1999).]

[franksch3]

Buuri is right. Think of water. It is nice that EMBM makes it look as if it has waves. But the effect is completely spoiled at places where the water intersects a wall, since it is a flat polygon there. That effect will be quite noticable with big waves.

Using T&L you can make the bigger waves using polygons, and EMBM for the extra detail of the water. So these two technologies really add to eachother.

Currently walls look flat even with a brick texture on it. Even with a T&L engine, you can't make every brick consisting out of many polygons. Using EMBM you can add that small relief effect of stones while not using hundreds of more polygons.

Only drawback of EMBM is that it is only usable for lightmaps and not for polygon lighting using gouroud shading.