More Current Features

What about Permedia3?

3Dlabs has also been looking into the texture management camp for their Permedia3 Create! processor. Their method of implementing hundreds of megabytes of textures in a single scene is called Virtual Textures. VT allows Permedia3 Create! to use its texture RAM as a cache for textures stored in main system RAM. Instead of loading whole textures at a time, Virtual Textures allow Permedia3 to load only the specific parts of any texture it needs.

A hardware engine breaks up textures into smaller, more manageable subtextures. Whenever a texture is called, Permedia3 will analyze how much of the texture is actually visible (not culled by an obstructing object), and only load whatever visible subtextures are needed.

Matrox's bump mapping

One of the biggest 3D improvements Matrox has implemented for their new G400 processor was hardware acceleration for environment mapped bump mapping. Before the G400 campaign, bump mapping was an enigmatic formula to display height detail on textures. While environment mapped bump mapping doesn't change that, it showed the world with how much effectiveness bumps be could implemented.

The addition of animated environment maps to the bump maps allows for an incredible amount of additional detail, without a significant hit on the CPU or graphics chipset. Advanced bump and environment mapping techniques are now being implemented by a number of games in development, and if it proves to make enough of a visual difference, other 3D manufacturers are eventually going to follow suit and implement it.