7 replies to this topic

[yoku]

Does pollux GPU supports 2D acceleration's like Copy, Solid fill & alpha blending ?
Is there any library providing 2D API's ?

[benjymous]

Does pollux GPU supports 2D acceleration's like Copy, Solid fill & alpha blending ?
Is there any library providing 2D API's ?

You can do 2D with OpenGLES easily enough

[Exophase]

Does pollux GPU supports 2D acceleration's like Copy, Solid fill & alpha blending ?
Is there any library providing 2D API's ?

Textured quad rendering, flat quad rendering, and alpha blended quad rendering. The GPU lets you bypass transform and even triangle setup stages and access the rasterizer pretty raw. I think there's a fast fill of some sort too.

One interesting thing about the Pollux GPU, that I'm sure won't be exposed in OpenGL ES, is that textures can be tilemapped instead of bitmapped. The same way 2D consoles usually are. So you technically don't have to write a tile renderer to have a tiled 2D game, not that it's so difficult or slow to do one.

[yoku]

Does pollux GPU supports 2D acceleration's like Copy, Solid fill & alpha blending ?
Is there any library providing 2D API's ?

You can do 2D with OpenGLES easily enough

Actually I want to write Xserver-kdrive driver for WIZ.
Kdrive has support for Copy,Blend & Composite hooks. So if there is any library exposing these API's it will be great.
I am not quite sure whether 3D bliting API's can be integrated in kdrive, would it be feasible ?

[DaveC]

Does pollux GPU supports 2D acceleration's like Copy, Solid fill & alpha blending ?
Is there any library providing 2D API's ?

Textured quad rendering, flat quad rendering, and alpha blended quad rendering. The GPU lets you bypass transform and even triangle setup stages and access the rasterizer pretty raw. I think there's a fast fill of some sort too.

One interesting thing about the Pollux GPU, that I'm sure won't be exposed in OpenGL ES, is that textures can be tilemapped instead of bitmapped. The same way 2D consoles usually are. So you technically don't have to write a tile renderer to have a tiled 2D game, not that it's so difficult or slow to do one.

From what I remember devs moaning about in the past on the GP32 and GP2X was the fact that they had to write tile renderers from scratch and that always slowed things down.

Do you think it is possible for someone to write some kind of engine to use this hardware for emus like SNES etc (not really useful in Temper as it runs full speed now underclocked)? If so it would seem that this would make a pretty big improvement in speed.

[Exophase]

From what I remember devs moaning about in the past on the GP32 and GP2X was the fact that they had to write tile renderers from scratch and that always slowed things down.

This is different, the difference between using a 3D accelerator to render tiles from a tilemap in software and having it render from the map for you is minimal performance-wise.

Do you think it is possible for someone to write some kind of engine to use this hardware for emus like SNES etc (not really useful in Temper as it runs full speed now underclocked)? If so it would seem that this would make a pretty big improvement in speed.

Not if you want any kind of accuracy. You couldn't get any mid-frame effects working, which games use very regularly. You'd also have to track modifications to the tiles to you can flush the texture cache.

I doubt anyone's even going to use this feature because they'd have to access the 3D chip directly, although it can possibly be hacked on top of OGL.

Edited by Exophase, 16 July 2009 - 04:34 PM.

[DaveC]

From what I remember devs moaning about in the past on the GP32 and GP2X was the fact that they had to write tile renderers from scratch and that always slowed things down.

This is different, the difference between using a 3D accelerator to render tiles from a tilemap in software and having it render from the map for you is minimal performance-wise.

Do you think it is possible for someone to write some kind of engine to use this hardware for emus like SNES etc (not really useful in Temper as it runs full speed now underclocked)? If so it would seem that this would make a pretty big improvement in speed.

Not if you want any kind of accuracy. You couldn't get any mid-frame effects working, which games use very regularly. You'd also have to track modifications to the tiles to you can flush the texture cache.

I doubt anyone's even going to use this feature because they'd have to access the 3D chip directly, although it can possibly be hacked on top of OGL.

Thanks for the info. I thought there would be a catch

Well maybe the 3D and tiling hardware can be at least used for a fancy menu or something

[CongoZombie]

Well maybe the 3D and tiling hardware can be at least used for a fancy menu or something

As far as I can tell, it isn't even really "tile hardware" per se, it is just a convinient way of addressing tiles within a texture (i.e. it treats each tile as being one pixel within the texture, making it easier to select the right tile with UV coordinates). I will have a play around when I get my Wiz though- if anything, it will be nice to have a little minimal library to do hardware accelerated tile engines.