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<meta name="vstitle" content="Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book, Special Edition" />
<meta name="vsauthor" content="Michael Abrash" />
<meta name="vspublisher" content="The Coriolis Group" />
<meta name="vspubdate" content="07/01/97" />
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<title>Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book Special Edition: 3-D Shading</title>
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<h2 id="Heading1">Chapter 54<br />
3-D Shading</h2>
<h3 id="Heading2">Putting Realistic Surfaces on Animated 3-D Objects</h3>
<p>At the end of the previous chapter, X-Sharp had just acquired basic hidden-surface capability, and performance had been vastly improved through the use of fixed-point arithmetic. In this chapter, we&rsquo;re going to add quite a bit more: support for 8088 and 80286 PCs, a general color model, and shading. That&rsquo;s an awful lot to cover in one chapter (actually, it&rsquo;ll spill over into the next chapter), so let&rsquo;s get to it!</p>
<h3 id="Heading3">Support for Older Processors</h3>
<p>To date, X-Sharp has run on only the 386 and 486, because it uses 32-bit multiply and divide instructions that sub-386 processors don&rsquo;t support. I chose 32-bit instructions for two reasons: They&rsquo;re much faster for 16.16 fixed-point arithmetic than any approach that works on the 8088 and 286; and they&rsquo;re much easier to implement than any other approach. In short, I was after maximum performance, and I was perhaps just a little lazy.</p>
<p>I should have known better than to try to sneak this one by you. The most common feedback I&rsquo;ve gotten on X-Sharp is that I should make it support the 8088 and 286. Well, I can take a hint as well as the next guy. Listing 54.1 is an improved version of FIXED.ASM, containing dual 386/8088 versions of <b>CosSin(), XformVec()</b>, and <b>ConcatXforms()</b>, as well as <b>FixedMul()</b> and <b>FixedDiv()</b>.</p>
<p>Given the new version of FIXED.ASM, with <b>USE386</b> set to 0, X-Sharp will now run on any processor. That&rsquo;s not to say that it will run fast on any processor, or at least not as fast as it used to. The switch to 8088 instructions makes X-Sharp&rsquo;s fixed-point calculations about 2.5 times slower overall. Since a PC is perhaps 40 times slower than a 486/33, we&rsquo;re talking about a hundred-times speed difference between the low end and mainstream. A 486/33 can animate a 72-sided ball, complete with shading (as discussed later), at 60 frames per second (fps), with plenty of cycles to spare; an 8-MHz AT can animate the same ball at about 6 fps. Clearly, the level of animation an application uses must be tailored to the available CPU horsepower.</p>
<p>The implementation of a 32-bit multiply using 8088 instructions is a simple matter of adding together four partial products. A 32-bit divide is not so simple, however. In fact, in Listing 54.1 I&rsquo;ve chosen not to implement a full 32x32 divide, but rather only a 32x16 divide. The reason is simple: performance. A 32x16 divide can be implemented on an 8088 with two <b>DIV</b> instructions, but a 32x32 divide takes a great deal more work, so far as I can see. (If anyone has a fast 32x32 divide, or has a faster way to handle signed multiplies and divides than the approach taken by Listing 54.1, please drop me a line care of the publisher.) In X-Sharp, division is used only to divide either X or Y by Z in the process of projecting from view space to screen space, so the cost of using a 32x16 divide is merely some inaccuracy in calculating screen coordinates, especially when objects get very close to the Z = 0 plane. This error is not cumulative (that is, it doesn&rsquo;t carry over to later frames), and in my experience doesn&rsquo;t cause noticeable image degradation; therefore, given the already slow performance of the 8088 and 286, I&rsquo;ve opted for performance over precision.</p>
<p>At any rate, please keep in mind that the non-386 version of <b>FixedDiv()</b> is <i>not</i> a general-purpose 32x32 fixed-point division routine. In fact, it will generate a divide-by-zero error if passed a fixed-point divisor between -1 and 1. As I&rsquo;ve explained, the non-386 version of <b>Fixed-Div()</b> is designed to do just what X-Sharp needs, and no more, as quickly as possible.</p>
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Graphics Programming Black Book &copy; 2001 Michael Abrash
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