Good News (on off topic)

[Atrocities]

I dont't know if it will help in graphics editting or not. I know that it makes Tribes 2 screem. (Any one who cares to know, Tribes 2 is an awsome looking game. Can't wait for the Shifter mods.)

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"We've made too many compromises already, too many retreats! They invade our space and we fall back -- they assimilate entire worlds and we fall back! Not again! The line must be drawn here -- this far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!" -- Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard
New Age Ship Yards

[Baron Munchausen]

Actual rendering cannot be assisted by the graphics card. By definition, an accelerated graphics card is taking some instructions and doing the rendering itself to relieve some of the work from the CPU, while a rendering program is supposed to be figuring out how to produce a graphical image -- using instructions that you give it -- and then let you save the data. How does it get the finished graphic back from the card if it sends the data out to be rendered remotely? Maybe they will add this in one day since graphics cards are getting so powerful, but I am not aware of any graphics card now that renders an image and returns the binary data for a program to use.

This does not mean that a good graphics card cannot help with a graphical design program, of course. Displaying the created graphics will still be faster. But for now there's no speedup in the actual rendering.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 30 June 2001).]

[zen.]

As a 3D dabbler, I concur. At least, not the cards you can buy down at Best Buy. Actual 3D rendering can only be assisted by CPU and RAM. If you want a graphics card to help you out, you'll have to buy one of the thousand-dollar 3D cards that they tend to use in SGI workstations and such, like 3Dlabs' (http://www.3dlabs.com/) Oxygen cards. I hear they're not very good for your standard 3D gaming, though...but I'm out of date. Anyone have direct experience with the professional cards?

Oh, and as an interesting side note, the Final Fantasy movie coming out soon has twice the resolution of HDTV, and each FRAME is 10MB in size. Yes, that means each SECOND of movie screen time takes up 240MB.

zen

[Spoo]

quote:

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Yes, that means each SECOND of movie screen time takes up 240MB.

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Only a tad wasteful...

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Assume you have a 1kg squirrel
E=mc^2
E=1kg(3x10^8m/s)^2=9x10^16J
which, if I'm not mistaken, is equivilent to roughly a 50 megaton nuclear bomb.
Fear the squirrel.