[sldev] branches/shadow-draft missing llrender.cpp

[Tofu Linden]

Soft wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Tofu Linden <tofu.linden at lindenlab.com> wrote:
>> The unexpected 'bonus' tessellation on flat surfaces does nothing
>> to help describe the shape of the geometry but exists (AFAIK) as
>> a hack to make per-vertex lighting look significantly less ugly.
>>
>> The shadow-draft branch's per-pixel lighting almost certainly
>> makes the extra tessellation redundant, but on the other hand
>> I don't think there's data to suggest that the extra polygons
>> are an appreciable performance hit (not that they help).
> 
> Actually, they can help tremendously. Our ginormous 4 megabyte 1k by
> 1k RGBA textures blow out the texture cache on many a graphics card.
> Tesselating large surfaces increases the likelihood of cache hits.

I was under the impression that non-ancient GPUs rasterize into
(and out of) microtiles for this reason amongst others.