#Anti-aliasing
5 messages in this thread
Your article in January's Cadence, on page 76, said that Panacea's DLD 386
Deluxe supported anti-aliasing. Are you sure? A client of mine that has
the Diamond Speedstar Hi-Color wants to know if that would work on his
similarly chip-equipped card.
Thanks for any help you might provide.
Lansing Pugh
Authorized AutoCAD Dealer / Austin, Texas
Lansing,
DLD386Deluxe supports antialiasing in CEG mode, but not Sierra HiColor
mode. Diamond's version of DLD386 does not contain CEG support, because
Diamond is not shipping CEG versions of the SpeedStar in quantity. If your
customer is interested, we sell Diamond specific upgrades to DLD386Deluxe
for $125.
Brad Ek [Panacea Inc.]
Yes, it's done in software. The board's 256-colors are anti-aliased down to
16 colors.
Isn't it amazing how software is taking over hardware? Software
display-list processing, software disk-doublers (Stacker), software disk
caching, software memory managers, software anti-aliasing, and in VMI's
case, RenderReady software that does an effective job of fooling the eye
into seeing true-color images.
Regards, Ralph G.
Ralph:
I don't know if I agree that software is taking over hardware… I think
the software writers discovered that the more products that they have out
there the more $ they will get from updates (feature or new hardware
generated…). The more $ from updates, the more products you can afford to
create… seems to me that the software industry is just figuring out the
same >features< of planned obsolescense that the hardware industry has been
using.
C#
If I understand your reference to VMI's Render Ready software, I think you
missed part of the implementation. I believe that there is custom
microcode on the VMI card that translates the 2**24 possible colors of a
pixel to a particular 2**8 blend in a 2×2 array. So your 1280x1024x8 card
is "equivalent" to a 640x480x32 piece of hardware. But you're right, the
process COULD be done totally in (host) software.