Oké, ik ben er een beetje laat mee (dat artikel staat er al twee dagen), maar ome Tom heeft dus weer eens een nieuw artikel klaar weten te krijgen. Tom legt uit aan welke eisen een hedendaagse videoplank moet voldoen. Niet echt schokkende info, maar wel leuk om een keer door te lezen. Hier een plak over hardware bump mapping:
Bump mapping is one of those 'hip' 3D-features to talk about. A lot of blah-blah was going on about it in the last twelve months and many people were trying to make a big deal about it on the Web although no game did really support it. Today bump mapping is implemented into DirectX and game developers are starting to play with this feature. It enables you to see a realistically shaped surface with a relief on it, rather than the boring good old flat 3D-surfaces we know so well from Quake2 or many other games. A good example is waves on a water surface. Environment mapping can increase the realism even further by adding realistic reflections to those surfaces. Most 3D-chips are currently realizing bump mapping by adding another alpha-blending rendering pass to the rendering process, which gives an 'OK' kind of impression in many cases, but it's still not really realistic. Matrox' G400 and supposedly 3Dlabs' Permedia3 are the only two chips that do real hardware bump mapping with environment maps right now, which is looking way better than the pseudo-bump mapping of its competitors. As soon as game developers make heavy usage of this nice feature, the other 3D-chip makers will have to come up with their hardware bump mapping solution as well.
