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SpaceJase on 08 April 2007
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Kwaad said:
 

I just wanna say you word that perfectly SpaceJase. You first build the texture. No matter what resolution it will run at, it needs optimized. So the actual total number of textures is what will cost the most. However what yo usay about the number of shaders is wrong. Bump-mapping, is a normal map, or multipul normal maps, computer generated from a complex 3D model. So actually most of the added shaders only add a little bit of render time. While the true texture count. (complexity of a game's detail, not resolution) is what will effect cost the most.

 

Cheers Kwaad. I don't work in 3D games but I do do a lot of 3D viz work. To me a bump map is just a greyscale image but I am aware that the real time guys do things differently and your nomal map explanation sounds about right.

Anyway, just to expand my point a bit further. As systems become more powerful shaders require ever more work on the part of the develper.

Let's take a dirty, blood smeared window that you might find in an FPS game like Doom 3 as an example. I reckon there would be 3-5 different texture maps / filters to create that one shader - diffuse, specular, refraction, reflection and maybe bump. At the risk of repeating myself, that is a lot of work! Of course larger storage allows for more shaders but what people fail to take into account is that it's not just a case of going out and taking a snapshot of a window - hours need to be spent in photoshop to get everything coming together just right. Couple that with the need to keep the art style consistant accross the whole game and you start to get an idea of just how much work is involved here.

I'm glad you brought up the difference between texture detail and screen resolution. It would, of course, be perfectly feasible, if a bit illogical, for a 1080p game to use low res texture maps and a 480p game to use high res ones (albiet the detail would only be apparent at close range).The point being that screen resolution only has an influence over texture detail and does not dictate it.