He is partly correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.

Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.

▲

arcanemachiner 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was not familiar with the teeth thing. Link for the lazy:

https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-addresses...

▲

opan an hour ago | parent [-]

Reminds me of Dwarf Fortress. I hear the individual teeth are simulated so they can be lost in a fight and such.

	▲	db48x an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, except the DF doesn’t compute shadows for all the teeth. Or texture map them, or use a shader to make them look wet and shiny. Still, if they get knocked out during a fight then your dwarves have to carry them individually to the gravesite afterwards, so it’s not like you should automatically imitate DF when you write your own game.

▲

zamadatix 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When the player zooms in to street level on a building it's worth the performance hit to load in more details and do so in a better looking way. When it's zoomed out to view large portions of the city (or the whole thing) then sure, you have to trade off graphical fidelity for performance and usability as the user builds out the city and wants to watch it grow. The amount at a given zoom should be based on the graphics settings, and low should allow for low detail even when zoomed in.

▲

db48x 2 hours ago | parent [-]

LOD (level of detail) techniques are used by practically every game ever written. It doesn’t mean that the developers can ignore the poly budget.

▲

lukebitts an hour ago | parent [-]

You are correct but what the article is asking for is nothing out of the ordinary, in fact mods already do what the author is asking for, just not in an automatic way

	▲	GenerocUsername an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And how are those mods on baseline performance? Are the mods appropriate for general audience mid range rigs? The tech industry has the capability of pure ray tracing. Game engines don't use it because the audience willing to shell 10k for PC to run it is exceedingly small. They have to target mid range specs to have an audience big enough to make money. The solution is mods by modders for modders.

▲

alienbaby 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As well as the teeth, I understand they had issues along the lines of using preview rendering tech in unity that then was not further developed and dropped from the engine? Causing them to need to write a fair amount of render stuff themselves? .. something similar to that at least I'm sure.

▲

Stevvo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Much of what is suggested could decrease texture memory usage. If you add a masked dirt material on top of a surface, you can often decrease the resolution of the texture of the base material underneath thanks to the added detail.

▲

arnavpraneet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This seems like the logical explanation, it still doesn't run that great even on GeForce Now