BFG10K,
?Wrong, the UT engine removes overdraw in software, ie the CPU. Therefore I'm interested to know why the Kyro2 is pulling so far ahead.?
It can?t remove all overdraw. Heheh ? if it did, everyone would want it and there would be no point for tilers (although, they would be the first to have accelerated that part of the game engine in hardware!).
No. I?m not overly familiar with the system UT uss but I?d imagine it would be reasonably similar to the BSP tree system Quake 3 uses. It cuts the much overdraw by eliminating the rendering on rooms / areas outside of the current area -- If you look at many of the interconnecting parts of quake3 maps they are often obscured by a wall, or a corner etc, which signifies the cut-off point for the BSP; UT is similar.
However, this means that polygon overdraw will still be present for the contents in that area ? i.e. pillars, barrels, crates, models, weapons/ powerups etc will still be present in that area and will have overdraw that can?t have been eliminated by the engine.
However, its highly likely that the reason we see KYRO performing better at UT is probably purely due to the way it handles palletised textures; we all know that this is an area Geforce cards handle exceptionally poorly.