Day 4: Conferences: Implementing 3D Hardware Acceleration For Linux

In case you haven't looked at the other pages on this linuxexpo, Daryll Strauss is the person who wrote the hardware accelerated 3D drivers for the Voodoo cards, and the XFree support for the Banshee and Voodoo3 cards, among other things, and who is also known for managing the pool of linux servers working on the rendering on Titanic movie.

[picture]

Daryll was recently hired by Precision Insight (PI), to work on 3D for linux fulltime. 3DFX has now hired people to continue writing linux drivers for their cards.

Daryll gave an introduction of 3D rendering. The options are:

Raytracing: follows rays of lights form lightsource to camera
Backward raytracing: because many rays never hit the camera, an obvious optimization is to go backwards and follow rays that hit the camera back to their source
Radiosity: deals with energy transfert between objects but gives some artifacts
Painters Algorithm: sorts objects from furthest to nearest and then draw them
Watkins Algorithm (scan line Z-buffer): keeps track of all active polygons at each scan line and renders them into a scan line Z-buffer
Z-buffer: That's the algorithm that's easily done in hardware, keeps Z values for all the objects

You can find more about his talk by looking at his slides, which are in the middle of the picture library

Picture library

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