Modern 3D graphics explained

Dagon

Member
It's been a while since I've read through some graphics tech documents, and with the new hardware imminent, now's as good a time as any.

So, can any of you graphics whor...technology followers please point me in the direction of some good resources? If my games are going to be using bi- and trilinear filtering and MIP-mapping and all the other scarily acronymed technologies, I'd like to know what the hell they actually are.
 
There used to be a big guide on IGN a long, long time ago... perhaps on next-generation.com, that defined antitriscopic filtering, texture mapping, phong shading, all that shit. I wonder where that is, I remember not being able to find it like 2 years ago.
 
Dagon said:
It's been a while since I've read through some graphics tech documents, and with the new hardware imminent, now's as good a time as any.

So, can any of you graphics whor...technology followers please point me in the direction of some good resources? If my games are going to be using bi- and trilinear filtering and MIP-mapping and all the other scarily acronymed technologies, I'd like to know what the hell they actually are.
If I remember correctly... Bi-linear Filtering is used when you get really close to an object to estimate what a texture would look like really close. So it doesn't look all blocky. However, bi-linear filtering can be blurry.

Mip-mapping is used to eliminate a shimmer effect. Basically when a texture is too far away to actually be represented by all the pixels... you downgrade to a small texture that maps to the number of pixels you'll actually be drawing to.
 
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