Met alle nieuwe videokaarten die uitkomen met een hele vracht nieuwe features zou je zomaar de weg in het bos kwijt kunnen raken. Daarom heeft Matrox een verhaal neergezet over wat misverstanden die er zijn over hun eigen Environment Mapped Bump Mapping. Zeker nu de hardwarematige Texture & Lighting engines uitkomen (en omdat Matrox dat nog niet heeft waarschijnlijk 
) vond Matrox het nodig om het een en ander op te helderen. Ik licht er 1 puntje uit:
- Misconception #1: EMBM and T&L are competing technologies
- Misconception #2: Cubic environ. mapping and EMBM are the same
- Misconception #3: EMBM does not support dynamic lighting
- Misconception #4: EMBM is difficult to implement in games
- Misconception #5: EMBM results in a huge performance decrease
- Misconception #6: Few games support EMBM
Misconception #1:
Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) and hardware transform and lighting (T&L) enhance the quality of objects and scenes in different ways and are therefore not competing technologies.
- Hardware T&L uses extra geometry (polygons or triangles) to create and/or add more complex objects to a scene
- EMBM is used to add extra surface detail to the textures of these objects and also to add animated effects to 3D scenes.
For example, the large amount of triangles supported by hardware T&L would allow the nose or the skeletal features of a character’s face to be modeled with great precision. EMBM would then be used to add stubble, goose bumps, porous skin, freckles and even sweat. Likewise, if T&L were used to model the curves of a sports car, EMBM would then be used to add mud, rust and scratches—details that would drain a developer’s polygon budget if attempted with T&L.
While some of these details could be added using extra geometry, the time spent modeling such detail is impractical for any developer and would be a terrible waste of precious polygons.
