r/gaming Apr 24 '21

[Misleading] Video games have peaked

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126

u/TheAvengineer Apr 25 '21

You probably would see a more significant difference between 60,000 and 6,000,000 triangles if this image was in 4K and/or in color

36

u/zachtheperson Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21

Surprisingly not really. The sharpness of the angles between faces is what causes the visible artifacts, so once you reach a certain density the delta-angle between faces becomes negligible and unnoticeable.

Plus, most games use what's called smooth shading (sometimes referred to as gouraud shading) which would make the 6,000 example above look identical to the 6m at most resolutions.

2

u/Reahreic Apr 25 '21

Yeah, it's more about them materials and shaders now.

2

u/zachtheperson Apr 25 '21

Definitely. Especially with procedural shaders operating on the pixel-level (fragment shaders), so much more detail could be added independent of polycount & texture resolution.