NSR - NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer
NVIDIA is very proud on their 'Shading Rasterizer'. As a matter of fact it is supposed to be the technological key feature of GeForce2 GTS.
GeForce2's 'HyperTexel Pipelines' are supposedly able to do 7 different pixel operations in one pass per pipeline. GeForce and even earlier chips could do most of them in one pass already. The three exceptions are Per-Pixel Bump Mapping, Per-Pixel Diffuse Lighting and Per-Pixel Specular Lighting. Although it's a great idea to list those three as if they were all something different, each one is simply one way of using Per-Pixel Lighting. We'll get to that later.
The question now is, how many of those operations together can be done by NSR in one pass. The basic texture and the three per-pixel lighting operations can all be done in one pass, since they only depend on the texture and normal map that need to be applied. I wonder however, if colored fog, ambient light and alpha transparency can be applied in the same pass as well.
Per-Pixel Lighting - The Secret Behind NSR
Now that we've talked so much about transforming, wire frames and more in the last year it is really time to look into lighting a bit more closely. We know one thing. Without light the world would be dark, an experience many of us had when they've ever encountered a major power outage at night. Obviously it's just the same with the virtual 3D world created by our favorite 3D game. To get light into it, and realistic light at that, there have been two common techniques so far. The first, most widely used, and by T&L (what do you think the 'L' stands for?) supported lighting technique is 'vertex lighting'. The other well-known technique is the usage of 'light maps', which are applied in the texturing process.
