What is it?

[wysecracker]

What is multi texturing?
And what's the deal with numbers of pipes and engines in GeForce cards?

 

[mpjesse]

OK, the last guy was kinda vague, so i'll go in depth.

Multitexturing: Pretty simple. Back in the day, only one color was applied to each polygon to form a shape. Games like tie fighter and old flight sims are a perfect example. They "textureless". They looked like paper airplanes. Nowadays, everything has a texture. Walls, faces, objects, etc. Multitexturing is basically a texture that constant changes in appearance- just like any object changing in appearance from your eye. Look at a wood table from ten feet away- the table looks brown. Get closer and you'll see the fine lines and grain in the wood. Apply that to a 3D environment and you'll have a vague idea what multitexturing is. I could get a WHOLE lot more technical and get into texels and pixels, but it would take forever.

Pipelines: The Geforce 2 has 4 rendering pipelines. This is the equivalent to 4 processors in one- sort of. Each pipeline renders a seperate scene, object, pixel, etc. This increases frame rate- basically. Each pipeline renders something in one clock cycle. The more pipelines- the more rendering is done in a clock cycle- increasing frame rate. Got it?

Like I said- all this is a generalization. So, anyone who wants to trip and find flaws in what i wrote- that's fine. I'm putting it in lamens terms. I know how rendering works-so please don't reply with stupid responses.

-MP Jesse