Parhelia doesn't need Occlusion Culling....

[Nemesis77]

Originally posted by: HardWareXpert

Originally posted by: Nemesis77

Originally posted by: PG
Wow, do you really believe that a G400 equals a GeForce256 in speed? :Q
...and had more features? :Q :Q

just remember to pass the crack pipe and share

Dunno about performance but... When did GeForce get EMBM?

GF3 upwards supported EMBM, not that it was a big deal because hardly any games supported it.

To my knowledge there were quite a few games that supported EMBM. And you could say that the features GF256 brought to table were unused for a long time (T&L anyone?)

 

[Czar]

another thing the g400 had and the geforce256 didnt have.. I think
Vibrant colors, as in 16bit output processed with 32bit colors

 

[ElFenix]

Occlusion culling is a different technology that allows occluded pixels (those not visible to the user) to be discarded before they are textured.

on the gf3 it doesn't work all that well either. i suppose on the gf4 its better but i imagine i still take a huge performance hit when playing daoc. the game doesn't do any triangle count reduction on player models when they're far away. so if i face an area with a lot of players in it a molasses effect happens. this occurs whether the players are behind a huge wall or not. i can already tell when theres a lot of people in the keep waiting to be ported to the other realms because the molasses kicks in when i face the keep. its awful. if this can actually reduce the triangle count of the model it would work a ton better in that situation because its obvious to me that nvidia's occlusion culling isn't working real well. again, this is my experience with a GF3, so its not the most modern occlusion culling engine, but the GF4 seems like its probably 10% to 20% better.

 

[Sunner]

Maybe DAOC uses back to front rendering?

 

[CplHicks]

Another point, and correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't Occlusion Culling work with all programs/games? OTOH Displacement Mapping/Depth-Adaptive Tesselation would have to be taken into account by the game programmers (right? wrong?). So unless it's a feature that developers like and implement it won't help at all (think about T-Buffers, EMBM for G450, etc.). Let's face it, features that give speed and visual improvement right away matter more to buyers then long-term features. Think back to TNT2 vs. Voodoo3, they both were fairly equal on speed (flip flopped with different games and features on) but TNT2 also offered 32bpp right away, and instant upgrade if you will.

 

[Electric Amish]

Yes, the DM will have to be taken under consideration by the developers, but many, many developers have jumped on this bandwagon.

As for the rest...

Yes, it is not occlusion culling. It still draws the areas that are behind other areas. But, it still performs some of the same function that OC does.

If an area is behind another area it is effectively farthe away from the viewer. Therefore it gets drawn at a lower LOD. This should save all around, Pixel shaders, memory, everything. Shouldn't it??

I mean it's not as much savings as not drawing it at all, but it's a savings nontheless.

amish

 

[Czar]

I mean it's not as much savings as not drawing it at all, but it's a savings nontheless.

but only on tessalated surfaces, not ingame polygons

 

[CplHicks]

NFS4: They are two different techniques aimed at tackling two different scenarios. They are not competing technolgies so I'm not quite sure I see your point.

I think that is the most important point in this argument. They're both good features and cards/chips should support both of them (and most likely they eventually will). However, if one had to pick which feature to support (and Matrox obvoiusly had to make this decision) it would seem like occlusion culling is the more effective feature. Of course, Matrox has a reputation of bringing some new features in from left field (e.g. EMBM), and whether or not they make a difference will only be known in time.

 

[Chumster]

Originally posted by: Electric Amish
Yes, the DM will have to be taken under consideration by the developers, but many, many developers have jumped on this bandwagon.

....

This is not a rhetorical question at all - but which developers are supporting this feature? Just skimming through a few recent articles (by no means an extensive search), I couldn't find a single mention of the technology.

Got links?

Chum

 

[Electric Amish]

Developer quotes...

amish