By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
curl-6 on 06 October 2014
Edit Thread
megafenix said:
curl-6 said:

It's hard to tell from the single screen of it that we have, and it'll be even harder to tell zooming passed it at high speed, so I'd still put my money on normal mapping.

Remember, they're doing deferred rendering at 60fps with 4k-8k textures, atmospheric scattering, SSAO, etc. I don't think they'd have the horsepower to spare for tesselation.


Its true that there are already some graphic effetcs like defered shading that consume some of the horsepower and that the game will run at variable 60fps, but if they use tesselation they dont have to apply maxium quality, you can select tesselation level from 1 to 64 depending on the level of detail you want, and normally you keep tesselation level very low to distant objects(they are likely using adaptive tesselation); not to mention that they also seem to be using tiles to reduce the horsepower required for the rendering

the tiled textures may help to reduce the strees on the gpu even if they use tesselation, and also they can choose a tesselation level depending on the distance and select a good tesselation factor when the objects are near and keep tesselation to the lowest when things are at distance

I am not sure if normal maps would be enough to simulate the appearence of the oriinal 3d meshes of 1GB, not to mention that normal maps cannot be used with tesselation like the dispalcements maps and therefor shinen would not have been able to process the the original 3d scanned meshes and transform them into compatible assets requiring less memory storage

The thing is though, for background objects passing by at high speeds you don't really need tesselation or displacement because the player won't get a chance to study in detail for more than a second or so, so normal mapping should be sufficient to fool the eye for that brief glimpse. If it was something you see up close, like the player's vehicle, it'd be another story, but I'm pretty sure the meshes they're talking about are for stuff like terrain.