Gearbox over Fillrate vs T&L

Voodoo Extreme heeft wederom een toevoeging gepost aan hun Fillrate vs T&L artikel. Deze opmerking is afkomstig van Randy Pitchford van Gearbox Software (developers van Opposing Force):

New features like T&L are very nice, but they are widening the gap between low-end and high-end systems. This is not a new problem for software engineers, just a new technology - and a wider gap.

The classic technology dilemma is this: Developers who want their game played by as many people as possible have to consider carefully how to deliver the nicest looking graphics (if only visuals are relevant in a tech discussion like this) to the widest audience who own hardware capable of running the game. Because technology is advancing as rapidly as it is and because more and more "common" users who not are used to upgrading their computers every year are buying systems for the first time, I suspect that the wisest developers will focus on scalability. We are now challenged with the widest gap between consumer level high-end and low-end users since the dawn of this industry. The competition and innovation that is happening in the hardware industry right now suggests that this gap will widen even more over the next couple of years. Typically, scalability solutions involve dynamically dealing with more or less polygons depending on the user machine's capabilities, so I would bet that many engineers who are concerning themselves with scalability will want to support T&L to make their content look as nice as possible on systems that it can.

But, if forced to choose *only* between taking advantage of T&L *or* abusing fill-rate, I'll choose to abuse fill-rate (for now). If I create software that *requires* hardware T&L, I'll be severely limiting my audience (at least for the next couple of years). Abusing fill-rate will only cause the game to run slower on lesser systems, instead of not running at all. I would assume, in this scenario, that we can turn off things like AA for the lesser machines.

Check de complete posting bij VE.