The State of Parallax Mapping in 2023

JSVickers

Hi all, first post here but I'm currently on my journey of getting into tech art and I've hit the topic of parallax mapping. There are quite a few posts on here regarding this, but they mostly seem quite outdated and I wanted to see if perspectives have shifted or remain the same regarding the use of parallax mapping.

I've done some testing on my own machine, and it seems in 9 situations out of 10, adding geometry to a mesh via a displacement map then decimating it down to a reasonable polygon count is more performant than using a parallax map. (Perhaps due to GPU's becoming for more effective at rendering triangles than they used to be).

So here are my question(s), which aim to expand on the questions posed in this thread from 2020;

Is parallax mapping still useful in the year of our lord 2023?

Does anyone know of any modern AA or AAA games that are still using parallax mapping? Particularly, are they still using it the same way older games such as Oblivion used it for rocks / bricks on walls and floor, or do most games just use extra triangles now?

What are the situations where parallax mapping is still useful?

Would just appreciate some discussion on this topic, as information is relatively sparse online.

Eric Chadwick

I don’t have any recent data to share, but I would suggest adding a question mark to the subject line, just so it’s more obvious you’re seeking answers rather than providing them  

I do know that shader complexity still does remain the bottleneck in many cases. So geometry tends to perform better.

ZacD

POM currently seems most useful in games where you're supporting a wide range of platforms and have performance to spare on the high end. Easy enough to swap a more expensive shader.

poopipe

I assume we're talking about POM rather than the wider idea of a parallax material (ie. a UV offset based on view angle which is basically free) 

POM is texture read and pixel cost heavy (cos you're basically raymarching), but it is scalable, you're saving memory by not loading a dense mesh and (importantly) you can apply detail as a texture rather than having to twat around making models. 

POM isn't appropriate when you want things to poke out of a surface or if you have larger scale information (particularly hard surface type shapes) because it can't do those things well.
Using a dense mesh isn't appropriate if you need to cover a large area or need things to change dynamically because that means you have a shit load of geometry to process all the time . 
We mostly use POM on decals and terrain for those reasons - and yes, recently shipped games feature POM

fwiw, I can't see how you would test which was 'always' faster  - they're not even remotely connected in terms of the resources used 

gnoop

We tried POM and while it looks  great on  stills it always had sort of floaty feeling in motion  .  Especially when you look at surface with sharp angle . Looks like something is always  moving  a bit.  Especially if  some small 3d objects are there too.   The remedy was to make  lesser of  the shift and then  it instantly become hardly noticeable at all.