alt Hacker NewsBump maps and detail textures were a highly advanced and praised graphics technology in 1998, interesting to now see it explained as fake trickery from back in the day
P.S. I still see polygonal instead of truly round barrels in modern games, when will we finally have quadratic surfaces or some other solution for that?
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IshKebab • today at 11:53 AM
Well, it was also known to be fake trickery. But fake trickery that ran fast and looked good.
IIRC Quake 3 levels had true curved surfaces, though presumably they were polygonised at some point in the rendering pipeline.
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> when will we finally have quadratic surfaces or some other solution for that?
Truly quadratic? Not with any technology resembling current GPUs which are all about computing strictly linear (/affine) functions as fast as possible. Plausible approximate dynamic level-of-detail approach? That was first used by Quake III Arena in 1999, widely advertised as being able to render truly curved surfaces (which was of course not the case, it just tessellated Bezier patches/splines in real time).
We've had tessellation shaders for a long time now, able to dynamically subdivide surfaces to approximate round shapes on the fly on the GPU. The fact that there are still polygonal barrels is likely mostly about what things to prioritize.
The Holy Grail of real-time rendering is probably micropolygons – the ability to render the whole scene using polygons a fraction of the size of a single output pixel, something that off-line renderers like Pixar's RenderMan have done since the early 90s. There are reasons why GPUs are not very good at rendering a lot of extremely small polygons, leading to approaches such as Epic's Nanite virtualized geometry in Unreal Engine 5 which basically implements a software renderer running on GPU compute shaders.