by John Nagle <nagle@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
Jan 4, 2008 at 01:30 PM
Nathan Mates wrote:
> In article
<785160de-8577-4950-9424-14e91887063b@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> <bob@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> I was just wondering if we're going to start seeing computer games
>> where the primitive is points rather than triangles.
>
> You can do single-pixel points just fine in DirectX right now. [I
> assume OpenGL is similar.] However, a huge screen (e.g. 1600x1200 or
> bigger) would need a lot of single points to be visible. There's also
> the problem that the hardware (graphics cards) tend to sup****t
> triangles *great* and everything else not so well. This is a "network
> effect" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
) where
> what's sup****ted well gets a lot more sup****t, and everything else
> gets ignored.
>
> I suppose the bigger question is *why* would you think that points
> (maybe you mean spheres?) would look better?
He might be thinking of a ray-tracer. We still can't quite do
ray-tracing
in real time for non-trivial scenes on consumer grade hardware. It's
getting
close, though. See "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8".
John Nagle
