Do you mean displacement mapping? I’m sure it can do bump-mapping. I’m pretty sure my old laptop can do real-time bump-mapping. I think environment mapping takes more performance than bump-mapping and the PS2 can do that too.
Hmm, you’re probably right with those numbers. Like I said, the hardware is kind of dated now. Here’s some console specs:
http://www.totalvideogames.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6753[/quote]
nope, I meant bump mapping
the graphics chip can do:
gourad + textured + fogged + antialiased + zubuffered triangles
[strips and fans]
gourad + textured + fogged + antialiased + zbuffered lines
[line and linestrip]
shaded + textured + fogged sprites
shaded + textured + points
biliniear and trilinear texture filtering and “high efficency alpha blending without speed decrease”
as I said, there is no DOT3 routine or anything, bumpmapping can be done but isn’t part of the hardware and could be unnecescarily slow [because of zbuffer testing I’d imagine, but the docs imply that may have no penalty unless the difference from the existing value is high enough]
environment mapping more demanding? … I guess it could be, it is rather vaugely defined
see, it could be a static texture [or 6 if a cube map] that is simply alpha blended [add maybe] with the other textures on the geometry. This isn’t really demanding.
then there are textures rendered in real time, then mapped in a similar manner. this can be somewhat more demanding as you are essentially rendering the whole scene at least twice. Although, the environment is usually at a lot lower level of detail [case and point, in gran turismo 4 I haven’t seen trees or people in the rear view mirror ever. probably not in car reflections either]. Besides, they don’ thave to be recalculated every frame and don’t even have to always be the highest resolution. several objects can share one and all sorts of things.
[mmm, perspective correction… time to read up]
thanks for the link regarding the specs tho. now I want a gamecube more…