Programming Discussion Thread

[Ramoth]

(01-14-2015, 01:27 PM)Shonumi Wrote: From what I can see, endrift is just using OpenGL for the drawing portion. In 2D systems like the GBA, rendering is the process looking up tiles and then determining what pixel data should be generated from that. OpenGL natively has no way of knowing what to do with the tile data, so you can't pass the data off to OpenGL and expect it to generate an image. You can determine the pixel data yourself first into a buffer, then pass it on to OpenGL to push those pixels to your screen. There's a very important distinction between rendering and drawing. Think of rendering as the computer getting an "idea" of what the final image looks like, but drawing is the computer actually showing you what the image looks like. A lot of people use "rendering" to mean the "drawing" bit, however.

Fwiw, it'd be possible to do hardware rendering with something like OpenCL. If you can treat your GPU just like another processor, you could tell it how it's supposed to interpret the GBA's tile data as actual pixel data (rendering) and from there push that image on-screen (drawing).


Of course. With software rendering, you're in control of everything. You're the one that gets to decide the value of each and every last pixel. You're basically unstoppable in this mode

Is that tiled-rendering used by old 2D consoles like tile-based deferred rendering on PowerVR GPUs therefore it would be possible to emulate it on this architecture?
https://imgtec.com/powervr/graphics/architecture/
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/a-look-at-the-powervr-graphics-architecture-tile-based-rendering