essentially it comes down that both stand for issuing draw calls to the graphics card. a draw call here being the atomic operation of drawing. rendering pass, is as rick put it, mostly to give the draw calls a name. Ie under what kind of purpose the draw calls are issued... A rendering pass can be either for a single…
Despite having looked around online I haven't been able to figure out exactly what a draw call is and exactly what a render pass is. I understand that a render pass is going to use a vertex shader and pixel shader to generate a final layer that is then may be composited with other layers to form the finished frame, but I…
In theory you can draw an entire scene in about 2 or 3 draw calls (or passes) with virtual texturing, because everything is a single shader (the other draw calls or passes are for atlas lookups and stuff). You probably wouldnt store the entire scene as one mesh though.
For UE3 at least, I believe it ends up being one draw call per light per shader. So if you have a character that uses two shaders being lit by 3 dynamic lights, that will amount to 6 draw calls. Thankfully static lighting gets collapsed to a single draw call. However, in deferred lighting engines all lighting gets…
sorry to bump this old thread with a noob question, but can anyone explain to me if/how atlas textures affect draw calls? for example, if i had 2 seperate objects in a scene which both however use the same texture map/shader, what benefits do i actually get? wouldn't it still send seperate draw calls for each object?
the smoothing groups have no effect on the amount of draw calls just objects/materials but they might BREAK you triangle strips and make your model perform less good because of that ;)
So if I'm working on a game that will make use of modular pieces from which the player can build their own vehicles. Is it best to use a dynamic texture atlas or a texture array? If I'm understanding this correctly, it's 1 draw call per shader(material) but if I have 3 modular pieces using the same material with 3…
The benefit of a texture atlas is that you only have to bind 1 texture which means that it´s only one drawcall. Imagine you have ~10 textures on 1 atlas. You only have one drawcall for it, but if they were separate textures you would have 10 draw calls.
As I understand it, and I'm a little hazy: A drawcall sends geometry and texture information to the GPU. There may be several drawcalls for a single model if it uses multiple textures, shaders and smoothing groups. A rendering pass is where the engine draws the model on the screen, and it may need to calculate several…