Polygon count v texture count

doodo · 2006-11-15T13:00:03

Hi I have this small question that has been on the back of my mind since I’ve started doing 3D programming. Recently with a most of the new games coming out, a lot of emphasis have been put on pixel shader models 2.0 and 3. This includes bump mapping with direct shadows and new technique that are coming out. It seems a large process of the development work and also hardware is focused on improving the texture quality and the amount of memory available on graphics card with extra pipelining and optimisation. But, I haven’t seen any major increase in the amount of polygon’s cards can actually pump out these days. You have vertex processors on the GPU to lessen the effect of the CPU. Main question, why is that a large amount of work is being devoted to new texture and pixel shaders, when polygon counts are still needing to be relatively low? Is the expense of high polygon count with high texture count too large of a computational load on the cpu or gpu? The best example I have is if you look closely on new upcoming games you can identify very pointy surfaces on the model itself where it has low polygon count. But the designers use a very large hybrid of texturing technique that makes the model look high polygon. It’s my understanding that we’re using texture to substitute the low polygon crunch of gpu or cpu instead should be calculating a lot of normal maps from the polygon themselves.

Graphics and GPU Programming Programming

Started by doodo November 08, 2006 04:18 PM

19 comments, last by dave j 17 years, 5 months ago

dave j

692

November 15, 2006 01:00 PM

Quote:Original post by Ashaman73
Currently only DirectX10 supports this new kind of shader. NVidia/ATI will probably introduce new extensions to access it through OpenGL.

NVidia already support it though OpenGL - even under XP. Additionally, if you've got a pre-G80 NVidia card you can use NVEmulate to enable software emulation of geometry shading - so you can play about with them whilst you're getting a second mortgage/selling your first born child/etc to get the money together to afford a G80 card. [grin]

Polygon count v texture count

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Polygon count v texture count

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Reticulating splines