eWeek.com has a slideshow up in the form of Facebook’s recently popular “25 things” meme, showing 25 things you didn’t know about Microsoft. Of long-forgotten interest is #11: Microsoft Talisman.
From wikipedia’s “Microsoft Talisman” entry:
PixelFlow, and Talisman, attempted to reduce the memory bandwidth requirements primarily by leaving unchanged post-rendered objects in memory to be re-composited without change. The system used a series of memory buffers and parallel compositing engines to quickly “assemble” a display that was made up of a number of 2D images, or “tiles”. This technique is immediately suitable for 2D images, as any possible change in the display mapping can be made by individual mappings on the tiles. The same is not true from 3D, however, where rotations of the user’s viewpoint requires objects in the display to rotate in 3D, something that can only be simulated by modifying a 2D image.
See the aforementioned video “Chicken Crossing” after the break.
25 Things You Didn’t Know About Microsoft.
