| Game_boy said: But how many games will take advantage of that? That requires programmer time and lots of testing just for the >5% of people that have high-end hardware. I think graphics were good enough on the GC, (think Mario Sunshine) which had old hardware relative to PCs, and it's only the trend toward ultra-realism that's needing even current midrange PC hardware. |
Programmer time and testing is largely unimportant being that it would take less than 1 man-year to implement and test the technology; $50,000 may sound like a lot of money but it is a drop in the ocean of game development.
The artist's time is the important consideration because over 80% of game development costs are content creation. The reason why subdivision surfaces will be favoured is that it adds a minimal ammount of work (25%) and gives you a model which can be reused from this point on; consider how much of an advantage it would be for EA to create a couch model where they can reuse the exact same model in any game they create from this point on. Hypotetically speaking, large publishers and middleware developers will be able to create massive libraries of objects that are graphically advanced enough to last for years and could even have the physics-engine data built into them so they can be immediately plugged into a game engine.
