nemesis wrote:

>> Does it add more triangles to the areas of greatest curvature and 
>> fewer to the flat areas?
> 
> you know those Pixar movies?  The renderer used, Renderman, is basically 
> a scanline that breaks all geometry down to micropolygons measuring less 
> than a pixel on the fly.  You only see smooth curves as the final result...

Yes - but you can't do that in realtime [without a large warehouse full 
of high-end GPUs].

>> I often look at a game like HL and wonder how it's even possible. I 
>> mean, you walk through the map for, like, 20 minutes before you get to 
>> the other end. The total polygon count must be spine-tinglingly huge. 
>> And yet, even on a machine with only a few MB of RAM, it works.
> 
> machines evolve.  The amount of polygons going around in PS3 games or 
> Crysis certainly wasn't possible just a few years ago.

Yeah, but on the face of it, even an old game like Doom shouldn't be 
possible on today's most powerful GPUs if it just stores and renders 
everything directly. There must be some kind of trick to it...

-- 
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