Modern hardware optimization/limitations
polycounter lvl 13
Im getting back into game dev after a many years away, you know, because of life.
So my question came about as I was considering the best way to do LoD's I got some of what I would call higher poly stuff that I was looking to reduce etc.
I went through most of the stuff in the polycount wiki on LoD's that started to answer my questions, however there was a large thread from back in 2011 touching on this topic and there where some good points in there that even back then hardware was getting more powerful and better tools etc.
Since then you got unreal bringing out nanite (that I belive is just an insane amount of displacement/tesselation)
So my question really is what are the main avoidances these days, it seems less and less of a polycount issue and more to do with complex shaders, lighting, volumetric and ray tracing effects etc.
whats standard industry practice for different types of assets (character, vehicle, prop, environment etc) any useful resources to read would be good here.
With that said, using unity the one thing that seems to have kept constant is the dynamic batching capability, so maybe polycount is still a factor?
most hardware review sites are even starting to say 8GB vram is going out of fashion, you can store a hell of a lot of compressed textures in that space compared to 10 years ago oso how does texture size / count compare to again, say 10 years ago
My second question kind of relates more to my original point of researching is are LOD's still used a lot, whats the best practice here, in my research this dependent on the asset, organic/animated/hard surface.
Post 2 and 3 in this thread https://polycount.com/discussion/74619/lod-resources-information-anyone/p1 was what I was looking at, I suppose this is answering the question but I would suppose its down to your memory budget for having a second model/texture as an LoD.
So my question came about as I was considering the best way to do LoD's I got some of what I would call higher poly stuff that I was looking to reduce etc.
I went through most of the stuff in the polycount wiki on LoD's that started to answer my questions, however there was a large thread from back in 2011 touching on this topic and there where some good points in there that even back then hardware was getting more powerful and better tools etc.
Since then you got unreal bringing out nanite (that I belive is just an insane amount of displacement/tesselation)
So my question really is what are the main avoidances these days, it seems less and less of a polycount issue and more to do with complex shaders, lighting, volumetric and ray tracing effects etc.
whats standard industry practice for different types of assets (character, vehicle, prop, environment etc) any useful resources to read would be good here.
With that said, using unity the one thing that seems to have kept constant is the dynamic batching capability, so maybe polycount is still a factor?
most hardware review sites are even starting to say 8GB vram is going out of fashion, you can store a hell of a lot of compressed textures in that space compared to 10 years ago oso how does texture size / count compare to again, say 10 years ago
My second question kind of relates more to my original point of researching is are LOD's still used a lot, whats the best practice here, in my research this dependent on the asset, organic/animated/hard surface.
Post 2 and 3 in this thread https://polycount.com/discussion/74619/lod-resources-information-anyone/p1 was what I was looking at, I suppose this is answering the question but I would suppose its down to your memory budget for having a second model/texture as an LoD.
Replies
lods are still standard practice
nanite is amazing but it is not a magic bullet
we still dont have enough memory for all the things because we fill it up with massive textures and buttloads of very dense meshes - you can't be lazier because you need to put more stuff in.
a good lod is good for the same reasons a good lod was good 20 years ago - we dont like multiple triangles in a pixel
and yes - most of the fun new stuff is lighting related
The 'standard' amount of memory is always whatever the shittiest console has - currently that's the xbox series S with 10gb of unified memory (you're most likely looking at between 6 and 8 for graphics)
texture size wise - 4k is still silly, find another way to get the detail