On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 01:54:17PM -0500, Daniel Phillips wrote: > On Thursday 03 February 2005 13:33, Timothy Miller wrote: > > Were it only that simple. > > > > While it is possible to fill the entire screen that fast in one > > single operation, you forget the fact that to construct a scene, many > > pixels are over-drawn multiple times (that's why we have > > Z-buffering). > > Decent engines do very little overdraw. Hidden geometry is removed > before it ever gets to the card. In ID games, only movable objects are > dumped into the Z buffer on top of the scenery, which is only one pixel > deep. ID puts a huge load on the graphics card, but it's not overdraw, > it's things multitexturing and more recently, shaders. I don't know > too many details about the Unreal engine, but I'm fairly confident they > don't just dump all their geometry onto the card either.
Not everything is quake though (and it's derivatives). Techniques to avoid overdraw in 1st person shooters and similar *static* *close space* environments have been developed to a great extend, but there are a lot of applications out there that do totally different things, and most of the time avoiding overdraw is not feasible. Especially in programs with highly dynamic 3D environments. Personally I don't care if it's going to be an ASIC (which I take it means a fixed chip) or an FPGA since I'm not a hardware hacker, but I do realize that a lot of people are looking forward to be able to tinker with the thing, and I respect that. However let's not forget that in order to be competitive and viable to the non-hardware-hackers, speed is an issue of major importance. -- John Tsiombikas (Nuclear / the Lab) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://thelab.demoscene.gr/nuclear/ _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
