Billy "Wicked" Wilson van Voodoo Extreme heeft aan alle bekende Game Designers een e-mail afgevuurd met de vraag wat zei het belangrijkst vonden op korte termijn; een videokaart met een gruwelijk hoge fillrate en full screen anti-aliasing (3dfx Napalm), of een kaart met een lagere fillrate maar met hardware T&L (Geforce & Savage 2000). Voor alle reacties moet je hier zijn.
Maar dit had John Carmack (Doom & Quake series) te melden:
If it was just "fill rate vs triangle rate", the answer would definately be triangle rate (assuming reasonable fill rate to go with it), because you can easily make up for fill rate by just changing your resolution. This gives you scalability all the way from 320*240 to 1600*1200+, a range of 25 to 1. Geometry can't even profitably be scaled by 4 to 1 inside a given game design.It becomes a lot more complicated when anti-aliasing is added as a feature. The more triangles you add, the more aliasing you will get. Anti-aliasing is a great feature, because it makes EVERYTHING look better.
Note that 2x2 anti-aliasing is not exactly high quality AA, but it will still be an improvement over raw point sampling.
For fast action games, I would still lean towards the T&L solution, because if you are moving fast, you don't tend to notice aliasing. For a slow paced third person game, anti-aliasing would probably be more important.
John Carmack.
[break]En dit vond Ryan Feltrin van Xatrix Entertainment (Kingpin) ervan: [/break]
From a developers perspective, having T&L not only allows us to pump through more polygons, but also leaves the CPU open for more intensive gameplay oriented code (AI, skeletal/IK animation, etc). The advantages of this, is you can display a scene with more polygons, and more complex gameplay elements. To display the same scene on a card without T&L, the performance may drop if the CPU usage is too high when combining the extra gameplay elements, with the higher polygon count, since the CPU must also calculate the geometry.
An obvious advantage of the Non-T&L card is it will scale better as CPU power increases.
The question of which will dominate the other will most likely be answered on a per-game basis.
That being said, since I'm more in favour of scenes with higher polygon counts and more complex gameplay, my preference would have to go to a card with T&L.
Ryan Feltrin
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