ATI Xenos: XBOX 360 Graphics Demystified : Article

Quote: Those that have followed the development of 3D graphics over the past ten years or so will have seen a continual development of the capabilities of the processors, but fundamentally following the path of OpenGL pipeline model. 3dfx really ignited the market with their "Voodoo Graphics" add-in boards, which were not much more than just a raster engine: it utilised one chip for texture sampling and another for pixel processing (a simple Render Output unit - ROP); 3dfx further evolved that by adding an extra texture unit, allowing for slightly more complex effects in the raster pipeline. And so it was that this model was followed for a number of years with the main developments being the number of pixel pipelines and textures supported per pipeline, until NVIDIA took the step of moving further forward on OpenGL pipeline and giving accelerated support to the Transformation and Lighting process with GeForce 256. Whilst graphics processors had varying degrees of the geometry process, from clipping to setup, handled in hardware, adding a T&L engine was a significant step up the OpenGL pipeline, but didn’t really fundamentally change our thinking of graphics processors.

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