Chapter 6 - Gaming Optimizations

Abstract

This chapter examines and elucidates the level of detail (LOD) techniques used in games in the context of current and future game platforms. Since interactive gaming is the biggest consumer of advanced LOD techniques, LOD is particularly important to developers of game software and hardware. Games are also the most commercial environment using level of detail and the algorithms must be as robust and visually appealing as possible. In game environments, offline preprocessing of render data is vital for optimum efficiency, and this has a momentous impact on the use of LOD. Games operate under tighter memory constraints than any other medium for 3D graphics. A modern video game platform has the processing power of the highest-end workstation, but only 16 megabytes of memory with which to feed its graphics pipeline. Games give unique advantages when dealing with detail. The crux is how a particular set of restrictions and performance characteristics can affect the selection of techniques and the particular application of those techniques. Game platforms provide an appealing case study because they are very constrained in some ways. Games are an interesting case study for LOD because they are affected at so many levels by the concept. Games must deal with an ever-changing and often unpredictable rendering load while simultaneously being more closely bound to a constant refresh rate than any other commercial graphics application.