[sldev] Rendering Limits

[Ambrosia]

Thank you, Stickman.

Some people don't seem to have any idea that while SL lacks many
'special effects' of modern games,
it has vertexes/trianglecounts that make some other games look very
very pale in comparison.
Not that this is necessarily a good thing, mind you. It is partially a
reason why SL performs so low in FPS compared to other games.

Just to compare:

Doom3 creatures have a polygon count of around 3000-4000.
Yet people complain that the 50+k polygon avatar in SL renders slower
than that game for example.
Press ctrl+shift+1 in your client. Open the 'advanced' tab and look at
'ktris drawn'. I currently render 600K tris every frame.

600K.

The lack of uploadable texture shaders, custom bumpmaps, reflection
maps and the like often enough raise the -need- to go high with the
triangle count.
Quite frankly it shouldn't be like this, but currently..alas. Things
might get better when the shadow code goes final, but still, SL
currently has a way too high requirement for triangles to make things
look proper. That, or very cleverly baked
textures people tend to make in Maya, however most are simply not
skilled for it, or..quite simply can't afford
such a monster of an application.

So there is the dilemma. People complaining about SL lagging on a
8800, yet raging when LL tackles a source of avatar lag
that simply exists due to a technical circumstance.

What to do indeed. I personally can live with those new render limits.
To be honest, I haven't even noticed them at all yet, which is why I
was so surprised to read about them in this thread. I honestly didn't
notice in my everyday SL. And yes, I hang around high detail avatars.

Personally I think LL -needs- to invest into the development of what
is normal in many games. Shadows and light are coming. we need various
texture map types, alpha maps, shaders, mesh import, reflection maps.

We need to put things in that give detail without requiring lots of triangles.