Bevel / Face Weight Performance Cost
polycounter lvl 9
Could someone please explain the performance cost with reguards to the Bevel / Face weight technique - There is lots of content out there on how to use the technique but not a lot on the performance cost!
My understanding is you got a "Free Bevel" due to the way that split normals works. IE when you add a hard edge it splits the vert into 3 normals and the smoothed, beveled + weighted version has the same number of split points.
The project I'm working on budgets are based around Verts, a prop budget for example is 1k verts if I add the weighted normals that would raise my vert count to 3k ish which is way over my budget but does the technique mean this is not a problem?
My understanding is you got a "Free Bevel" due to the way that split normals works. IE when you add a hard edge it splits the vert into 3 normals and the smoothed, beveled + weighted version has the same number of split points.
The project I'm working on budgets are based around Verts, a prop budget for example is 1k verts if I add the weighted normals that would raise my vert count to 3k ish which is way over my budget but does the technique mean this is not a problem?
Replies
and..
Quibbling over whether extra vertices get sent to the GPU or not is basically a waste of effort from xbone onwards - that stuff is cheap and unless you do something stupid your top couple of lods are almost never a problem in terms of rendering cost.
The primary impact on performance is almost always from having geometry that is too dense for the view distance or from overdraw (related)