Ah ha ha, I am rich!
/end sexist misogyny
.Radeon Saphire Vs. GeForce FX
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kthulhu
- Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 6:01 pm
- Location: At the pony stable, brushing the pretty ponies
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gadoo
- Joined: Thu May 09, 2002 4:04 am
- Location: LA
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gadoo
- Joined: Thu May 09, 2002 4:04 am
- Location: LA
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klinky
- Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2001 12:23 am
- Location: Cookie College...
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3D games, yes it matters.
3D modeling, not exactly.
Alot of 3D modeling/rendering programs out there support OpenGL previews/workspaces. Most however do not render in hardware on your card. 3D cards are not designed for intensive 3D work. They work in a slightly different fashion over 3d rendering.
Mainly they're not as precise. They have limited hardware abilities. Such as lights being limited, texture space limitations, triangle support, not shader support until recently.
The reason 3D cards run so fast is because they have limits. They're not robust "do everything and the kitchen sink" types of deals. You have to do things a certain way or else stuff will run slow. Like many polygon models in 3D games are 300 - 1000 polygons each. Meanwhile a pro 3d model may have 30,000polygons just in the head of their character. Your game character has been textured with 3layer DXT compressed texture map hat are about 1MB. The pro modeled 3d model may have may have something like 28 layers of textures on it. The 3d game has 4 dynamic lights. The pro model has 10 different volumetric lights.
So they are limited to what they can do. Also I believe there is a fundamental difference. Where a 3D card translates triangles onto a 2D screen a raytracer traces lightwaves off of objects to create the things yo see. The later is much more realistic, but it is a very intensive process and one that is very hard to reproduce in realtime.
There are some pro cards out there like the Quadro and I believe the FireGL, but those mainly accelerate things like anti-aliased lines in your modeling program. Not the actual rendering process.
~klinky
3D modeling, not exactly.
Alot of 3D modeling/rendering programs out there support OpenGL previews/workspaces. Most however do not render in hardware on your card. 3D cards are not designed for intensive 3D work. They work in a slightly different fashion over 3d rendering.
Mainly they're not as precise. They have limited hardware abilities. Such as lights being limited, texture space limitations, triangle support, not shader support until recently.
The reason 3D cards run so fast is because they have limits. They're not robust "do everything and the kitchen sink" types of deals. You have to do things a certain way or else stuff will run slow. Like many polygon models in 3D games are 300 - 1000 polygons each. Meanwhile a pro 3d model may have 30,000polygons just in the head of their character. Your game character has been textured with 3layer DXT compressed texture map hat are about 1MB. The pro modeled 3d model may have may have something like 28 layers of textures on it. The 3d game has 4 dynamic lights. The pro model has 10 different volumetric lights.
So they are limited to what they can do. Also I believe there is a fundamental difference. Where a 3D card translates triangles onto a 2D screen a raytracer traces lightwaves off of objects to create the things yo see. The later is much more realistic, but it is a very intensive process and one that is very hard to reproduce in realtime.
There are some pro cards out there like the Quadro and I believe the FireGL, but those mainly accelerate things like anti-aliased lines in your modeling program. Not the actual rendering process.
~klinky
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SnhKnives
- V.I.E. 5.5
- Joined: Wed Mar 26, 2003 12:57 am
- Location: Atlanta
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