3 ms·
Random trivia - the PS2 processed pixels in 8x2 blocks (no texture) or 8x1 blocks (texture) - this made rasterization VERY FAST for large untextured triangles (
by aappleby 4y ago
Random trivia - the PS2 processed pixels in 8x2 blocks (no texture) or 8x1 blocks (texture) - this made rasterization VERY FAST for large untextured triangles (16 pixels/clock, potentially 4x Game Cube fill rate), but slow for tiny textured triangles (anything smaller than 8 pixels wide wastes pixel pipes).
- aappleby 4y agoGame Cube worked in 2x2 blocks of pixels and could also run primitive "shaders" by cycling a pixel block through the pipeline multiple times with different settings. Made for some nice bump mapping demos but I'm not sure how much it was used in practice.
- mikepurvis 4y agoI've always been kind of fascinated by the state of GPUs immediately prior to fully-programmable shaders becoming the norm. It particularly comes up in the world of emulation, where often those weird fixed-function pipelines were abused in interesting ways to produce particular effects, and now someone has to figure out how to write a shader for a modern GPU that can perfectly replicate what that old pipeline block used to do, including all the edge-cases around overflow, saturation, and so on. Unfortunately the inline demos seem to now be broken, but I found this article a fascinating treatise on how Gamecube and Wii games do things like render water: https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-effect-in-super-mario-sunshine/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef...
- anthk 4y agoI was about to post that, Wave Race.
- slavik81 4y ago> Unfortunately the inline demos seem to now be broken They work for me. I'm using Chrome 105 on a Pixel 4a.
- mikepurvis 4y agoAh nice— yes, for me also in Chrome. But seemingly not in Firefox on Windows 10.