3D engine math and a LOT of stuff

[wizardlife]

Once you're in 3d, you pretty well throw any hopes of using integers out the window... it's all floating points and trig.

I always thought that the point of a 3d accelerator card was to be optimized for fp operations so that it could perform translations and whatever independent of the cpu...

[k_girl]

yeah, the point of graphics cards is to have a seperate processor devoted just to graphics. many have support for z-buffering as well. i agree that fps are essential for graphics programming, otherwise you're going to have a lot of mismatched edges and lots of other problems. in c for instance, casts from float to int just truncate, so you don't even get rounding. i think however, relsoft's point was that he'd rather do backface culling than z-buffering, but personally i don't want to remember which order to add vertices and i like to do more complex stuff like nonconvex polygons and ones that are mutually overlapping. z-buffering keeps track of everything really simply; it allows you to focus more on the scene than what you have to do to get it to look right. if you use the painter's algorithm, you have to keep track of which polygons are behind others and add them to the scene in that order, another thing that i don't want to keep track of.

[relsoft]

Sorry, I'm speaking from c++ experience. in c++, x*y float values isn't that big of a deal. also, i've been mostly working with still shots, i'm now working on a raytracer

Hey, you may want to talk to Jark with Raytracing. Check out his Julia render.