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April 27, 2019 12:45 am
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/r7NymP-heAM/ask-slashdot-why-are-3d-games-vrar-still-rendered-using-polygons-in-2019
Ask Slashdot: Why Are 3D Games, VR/AR Still Rendered Using Polygons In 2019?
dryriver writes: A lot of people seem to believe that computers somehow need polygons, NURBS surfaces, voxels or point clouds "to be able to define and render 3D models to the screen at all." This isn't really true. All a computer needs to light, shade, and display a 3D model is to know the answer to the question "is there a surface point at coordinate XYZ or not." Many different mathematical structures or descriptors can be dreamed up that can tell a computer whether there is indeed a 3D model surface point at coordinate XYZ or behind a given screen pixel XY. Polygons/triangles are a very old approach to 3D graphics that was primarily designed not to overstress the very limited CPU and RAM resources of the first computers capable of displaying raster 3D graphics. The brains who invented the technique back in the late 1960s probably figured that by the 1990s at the latest, their method would be replaced by something better and more clever. Yet here we are in 2019 buying pricey Nvidia, AMD, and other GPUs that are primarily polygon/triangle accelerators. Why is this? Creating good-looking polygon models is still a slow, difficult, iterative and money intensive task in 2019. A good chunk of the $60 you pay for an AAA PC or console game is the sheer amount of time, manpower and effort required to make everything in a 15-hour-long game experience using unwieldy triangles and polygons. So why still use polygons at all? Why not dream up a completely new "there is a surface point here" technique that makes good 3D models easier to create and may render much, much faster than polygons/triangles on modern hardware to boot? Why use a 50-year-old approach to 3D graphics when new, better approaches can be pioneered?Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/r7NymP-heAM/ask-slashdot-why-are-3d-games-vrar-still-rendered-using-polygons-in-2019
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