I just played around with directx 8.1 sdk on my parhelia

[TdB]

and noticed 2 things:

It can´t render the RTPatch demo in hardware, shouldn´t the parhelia be able to do this, or does it just support NPatches.

in http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/t.../feat_summ.pdf
it says

Support for Bezier curves and N-patch (PN-triangle) evaluation

I always thought that RTPatches were Bezier curves.



the other thing i noticed by browsing the caps viewer, was that parhelia supports not only triplebuffering but also quadbuffering,(that is if I understood it correctly, im still a newbie when it comes to direct3d ).

isn´t quadbuffering kind of overkill, what possible advantage could quadbuffering have over tripplebuffering?

[SteveC]

Re: I just played around with directx 8.1 sdk on my parhelia

Originally posted by TDB
...

isn´t quadbuffering kind of overkill, what possible advantage could quadbuffering have over tripplebuffering?

On the spec sheet, it's one more over the competition.

[Maggi]

Re: I just played around with directx 8.1 sdk on my parhelia

Originally posted by TDB

what possible advantage could quadbuffering have over tripplebuffering?

One example could be that you need to render two perspectives of a given scene at once, for feeding a stereoscopic setup.

In that case, quad buffering could be used as "dual-double buffering" and it should improve performance over regular triple buffering.

But I'm just guessing and could be totally off, though ...

[TdB]

hmm!
my guess, would be some kind of motion-blur effect, or some sort of multisample AA, wasn´t that how the voodoo5 worked?

[DGhost]

As far as RTPatches go, that was something that NVidia was trying back with the GeForce 1 and 2 cards... iirc, the GeForce 3 and 4's don't support it anymore...

it is not required for DirectX 8 compliance.