[rescue] Is this a POS?

[joshua d boyd]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 06:53:14PM -0400, James Sharp wrote:

> From what I've seen, Blender does all of the rendering with the main CPU
> and then shuffles that data out to the video systems to be rendered
> through a moderate use of OpenGL or IrisGL.

I'm sorry, which rendering are you talking about?  Final rendering, or the
real time display stuff?
 
For final display stuff, I would expect Blender to do everything using
only the CPU, which may or may not work decently on an r8k (depending on
how far from optimized the default binary is).

For display stuff, I would expect blender to through everything to OpenGL,
and let the OpenGL implementation sort out what is done on CPU vs
hardware.  Mainly, turn off textures if on anything less than a High
Impact or O2.

Although, I'm not sure if turning off textured preview would
help.  Blender uses GL for everything, and that probably means that all
the characters are texture maps.   This I think would be particularly bad
on an r8k.

Still, I believe the video hardware would still help significantly.  I
think the GEs still kick in for software rendering, and the hardware depth
buffer would also help.

But, what Blender does is mainly just speculation.  I really am pretty
sure that they are using GL for drawing everything like the menus and
buttons though.

> Unless there's a way to get the rendered data back out of the video system
> to be able to save it to disk as an AVI stream or series of JPEGS, thats
> the only way to do it.

It is fully possible to make OpenGL (and presumably IrisGL) render to an
off screen buffer that can be saved to disk.  But, for a program like
Blender, why would you want to?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd