New life for the Genesis3d engine?

[Allanon]

I was reading this interview with Tim Sweeney that talks about how the next generation of CPU / GPU chips will allow programmers to write a software renderer for their engine using plain C++ instead of having to rely on Direct3d or OpenGL APIs. This got me to thinking about Genesis3d's software driver and that it might be able to take advantage of these new chips to bring new life to the Genesis3d engine. What do you think?

[Jay]

I didn't read the the interview, but yes i heard about Intel making an own graphics card which does use intel processors which are highly paralleled. Well I don't think genesis will gain a big speed hit by this, as even the software driver uses directx, and it had to be rewritten to use the new architecture.... The graphics card must still know what it has to do, and you still have to tell it what it has to do. The best thing about these thinghs is that you can do literally EVERYTHING you want with them. There will be no restrictions in what you can do, they could even learn a new version of DirectX or OpenGL with a driver (!!!) because OpenGL and DirectX are restricted to their functions and this thing is not, it can do everything you want, shaders can be programmed in software etc. You could even let it do the work of the CPU but it won't be very good at that, because it's paralelled architecture, and making it do CPU work will never reach its potencial. (3D rendering, on the other hand, can be parralled very well, it's one of the thinghs MMX was designed for)

[dylanwinn]

Intels new GPUs are a joke, ATI has a far superior architecture in their HD4870, and Nvidia has something similar on the way.

[Matte]

Isn't nVidea a part of intel? I thought they took over nVidea.
Well, I do know ATI was taken over by AMD.

[Allanon]

Jay, what I was getting at is the Genesis3d software driver is mostly written in software and doesn't rely heavily on Direct3d. The texture handling and polygon storage methods are all written in software and doesn't use Direct3d, this is why it's so hard to go from D3D7 to D3D9. But this will be an advantage now since it doesn't relying heavily on Direct3d. In the interview they suggested that programmers should be able to use older rendering techniques such as ray tracing and voxel rendering, because now it will be going back to just writing pixels to the screen like the early days of 3d rendering. Well Genesis3d's architecture is already setup to write frames to the screen so it might see a big increase without doing much to the driver.

[Jay]

What i mean is that if you don't tell the program that the grapchics card must do the work the cpu did formerly, the program won't magically give it to the graphics card. So, the code could be reused, but has to be sent to the graphics card instead of the cpu.

[Allanon]

What i mean is that if you don't tell the program that the grapchics card must do the work the cpu did formerly, the program won't magically give it to the graphics card. So, the code could be reused, but has to be sent to the graphics card instead of the cpu.

Nvidea has an API which you can get now call CUDA, it is a small set of C functions that allows a straightforward implementation of parallel algorithms. It also supports heterogeneous computation where applications can use both the CPU and GPU. Serial portions of applications are run on the CPU, and parallel portions are offloaded to the GPU. So it can be incrementally applied to existing C applications. At least that's what the documentation states.