3 ms·
Like mipmapping, trying to do level of detail at the GPU level only results in less rendering load, not less GPU memory consumption. Though on Apple’s ARM devi
by Pulcinella 4y ago
Like mipmapping, trying to do level of detail at the GPU level only results in less rendering load, not less GPU memory consumption.
Though on Apple’s ARM devices (and consoles) memory is shared between the CPU and GPU. I am unsure if making some asset available to the GPU to render (e.g. a texture) requires making an extra copy in ram just for the GPU, but if it is not required and you can just have one copy, then shouldn’t doing LODs GPU vs CPU require roughly the same amount of memory?
- Animats 4y agoIf you don't need a higher LOD for a texture yet, it doesn't need to be in memory at all. It can be out in a file or cache. Big-world networked games have something that looks like a cache hierarchy. There's content in the GPU, content in main memory, decompressed content in a cache on SSD, content that hasn't been decompressed yet, and content that's still on a server somewhere. Much of this data wrangling is done at a slower time scale than the frame rate. So you don't want to push all that down to the GPU level. The heavy machinery behind this is much of building a metaverse is really about. If you don't do all this, the result is low-rez, like Decentraland and Horizon. If you do it right, things look pretty good.