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Accumulation buffer

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First post, by leileilol

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The accumulation buffer is a long supported OpenGL feature from the 1.x days though it is only really used on professional cards and was rarely implemented to use in games.

What games used this buffer? What cards support this buffer? A googling reveals the shadermodel 2.0 lineup (NV3X/R3XX).

Is Voodoo5's hyped up T-Buffer literally the accumulation buffer through marketing?

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Reply 1 of 1, by obobskivich

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leileilol wrote:

Is Voodoo5's hyped up T-Buffer literally the accumulation buffer through marketing?

Doubtful. T-Buffer requires multiple chips with their own frame-buffers and each one can do/does independent processing for AA or motion-blur (where supported); it works in real-time and afaik is not supported on the single-chip hardware (like the 4500). The Sony GS may use this feature, or something very similar to it, for the DOF/motion blur effects it can do with some games (like GTA Vice City and Gran Turismo 3).

Here's a tutorial that looks at it more in-depth:
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse872/tutorial5.html
And this appears to cover it fairly well too:
http://www.forejune.com/stereo/samples10.pdf (section 10.1 specifically)

This site (http://www.saschawillems.de/?page_id=100) has a demo and the description mentions that many cards emulate the Accum buffer in software, which means a big performance hit. My Quadro FX 1700 is running it at 60-65 FPS (and if GPU-Z is to be believed, it appears to be doing it in hardware, as the GPU loading goes up substantially with it running); can try it on a GeForce if I remember.

I could not, however, find a definitive list of games that may use this buffer.

EDIT

Found an older article about T-Buffer with illustrations and the "why they aren't the same" hit me:

OpenGL Accumulation Buffer requires a frame to be rendered and then moved to it (images aren't rendered directly into it), and this can be done serially, so your GPU renders 1 then 2 then 3 then 4, etc in order and puts them into accum for whatever processing is done. T-Buffer has each GPU capable of rendering complete frames into frame buffer, so it would render 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 all at once, and then do whatever it wanted to do.

Here's the article I dug up from Anand (nice illustrations):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/350

There's a two-part Beyond3D article on T-Buffer that probably has more depth, but less graphics.