| Booh! said: I never talk about visual quality, just of rendering. So... about the rendering, I find very hard to believe that they use buffers with many different resolutions and different bit depths. Such a solution would be very heavy: you could save a bit of vram, but the computational cost for the GPU would be unbearable. Scaling (and converting if they're at different bit depth) every buffer(or a large number of) at every frame would be impossible. It's much easy (and reasonable) to use a small number of native resolutions (like 2 or 3), then compose the scene at low resolution and then upscale (once or twice). |
The point about visual quality was not specifically about something you said. It was just to underline that the end result is much more than the technical specs. As such maybe this kind of conversation should not drag on much longer as the thread tends to focus on the game as a whole and its impression on people rather than these details.
As for the different resolutions: the scaling of buffers will be computationally intensive if they are somewhat arbitrary, but will come almost for free if you can use modulo arithmetic in the same shader code that composes the buffers (say, a quarter-resolution buffer for the mist). Anyway, I think we should move this elsewhere :)
