Some background:
- Graphics Programming 2007
- Using Graphics Hardware 2008
- Game Graphics 2010 (1 page of general notes first)
- Game Graphics 2011 (Why)
Few A3 – A4 is coming (and is sortof part of P1)
Last time: why do we care about tech in Games
This time: why do we care about graphics in Games, and what do we do about it
What can graphics do for experience generation?
What does it need to do: Create a Dynamic World (usually not a slideshow)
exercise: why care about fancy show algorithms, or smoke rendering, …
- Realism / Style
- put you in a place (not necessarily a real one)
- Complexity and Richness
- Accuracy is not an issue
- Performance
- Effects
- Mood
- Characters
- Readability
Quality could mean lots of things:
- Accurate modeling of reality
- Subjective realism
- The “look” that we want
- Stylization
- Avoiding artifacts
To sumarize
- Control: get what you (or the Art Director) wants
- Authorability: to create what you want
- Flexibility
- Performance (keep up frame rate, leave resources for other things)
Tradeoffs (why are games different)
- Accuracy may not be an issue
- Generality might be a tradeoff (organize rooms a different way, change styile)
- Artistic Tradeoffs
- Need to provide specific mood/feelings (affect)
- Attractive
Graphics Basics
- Primitives not photons
- Is the “interactive graphics abstraction set” a given?
- Alternatives: ray tracing, …
- Many wasteful things about the way we do things (it’s brute force)
- but highly parallelizable
Levels of Abstraction for Doing Graphics
- Pixels
- Images
- Immediate-mode drawing
- Scene Graph
over time games have been moving up this chain
moving up the chain means lots of things can be done for you
Taking the primitive pipeline as a given…
- understand the abstractions it supports
- understand how it maps to the hardware
- one key to making it go fast
- understand how to get things to the hardware quickly
- not as important: understand how to avoid bottlenecks
- understand how to make it do stuff other than what it was meant for
The quest for performance
- Eric’s 3
- Approximation
- Preparation
- Amortization
- Avoidance
- Mapping well to hardware
