On Tuesday, 2 December 2003 19:15, Curtis L. Olson wrote: > If a person is working on some feature that won't be finished for 2 > years, then I think it is reasonable to try to predict card > performance that far out and write to future hardware. In large part, > that is what we did when we started the current FlightGear scenery > system.
Good point. 512 MB cards are probably less than a year away. 3-4 years from now 1 GB video cards will probably be the norm. I think the current practical limit for aerial/satelite scenery is about 4 meters/pixel and then only for small pre-rendered areas. One could add a detail map to enhance the textures at close range. Another option I thought of is to pre-render a corridor of scenery between arrival and departure points and if you fly outside of the corridor fall back to the default scenery. A corridor 100 km wide between Chicago (Illinois) and London (UK) (6378 km) would require about 311 GB of storage space using S3TC compression with a texture resolution of 1 meter/pixel. That translates to 13.88 MB of texture data flowing across the AGP bus every second if one was traveling at 1000km/h. That's possible with current hardware but it's out of most people's budgets. - 500MB disk with larger than 14 MB/sec transfer rates - 256 or 512 MB video card - PC with decent bus transfer rates The other side of the coin is to forget about the "raster" approach and use the "polygon" approach but that is less practical. i.e. Add lots of polygons to get more detail. I doubt that the polygon processing of GPUs is going to increase as fast as the amount of video RAM and besides that it takes space to store all those polygons. Ideas, ideas ... one can always dreaming I guess. Paul _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
