background color
reading font
reading size
Neverwinter Nights 2: Brian Lawson on NWN 2 Graphics
|
Brian Lawson, responding to a poster's less-than-enthusiastic thoughts about NWN 2's graphics, had this to say:
We're doing some things that you probably haven't seen yet in many other games out there. For one, 100% fully dynamic lighting AND shadows. I see a lot of games tout that, but have yet to really see it done at the full 100% level with a few exceptions (Doom 3 and the Crysis engine come to mind). That means everything is 100% dynamically lit on a per-pixel basis (no light maps or pre-baked lighting of anykind) as well as everything casts AND receives proper shadows. Of course there will be optional settings for the shadows.
However, when set to the max, shadow determination and shadow rendering easly take longer than rendering the final lit scene without shadows.
All of that together requires a lot of pixel pushing horsepower. There will be very few, if any current gen cards that could run at the asked about resolution with max settings turned on. SLI/Crossfire will help to a degree. A next-gen card would help even more.
One way to get decent to good to even great performance out of any of these types of (per-pixel lit) games is to run at a lower resolution. Something like 800x600 with a mild anti-aliasing setting enabled I find to be quite pleasing.
However, compare the number of pixels that have to be processed at 800x600 = 480,000 versus something like 1900x1620 = 3,078,000. That's 6.4 times as many pixels that require processing!! And remember that today's games are doing the same amount of work on a PER-PIXEL basis that yesterday's games used to do on a per-vertex basis. :o
Just food for thought.
Interesting! You can participate in the thread on the official forums.
Share/Email
