Croquet alpha release(s?)

Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus schwa at cc.gatech.edu
Thu Dec 5 08:03:08 UTC 2002


On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 09:08:28AM -0500, David A. Smith wrote:
> Most of graphics programming is dealing with large data sets with simple 
> transforms. To that end, we will be incorporating our general purpose 
> n-dimensional Matrix class which is intended to be used to access the VPUs 
> in a clean way. The goal here is to exceed the performance of C++. That 
> will probably be a project for next year.

Tell me more!  Arbitrary n-D matrix operations will be hardware
accelerated, yet accessed through a nice (extended) Smalltalk
interface?  Cool!

I understand that consumer graphics cards generally have bad
performance when it comes to reading data back from the card (ie:
glReadPixels).  Has/will this changed with the latest hardware (Radeon
9700 and NV30)?  Could you give a general idea of the bandwidth
available?  The reason I ask is that I can imagine speeding up things
like genetic algorithms.  Ideally, the objective function could be
compiled to run on the graphics hardware, but realistically it would
probably often require the CPU (please tell me I'm wrong).  In this
case, bandwidth from the VPU to the CPU becomes important.

Ok, back down to earth,
Joshua



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list