The top cards can do HDR+AA now, x1900 and 7900 etc, and there was a patch to enable it in Oblivion. Although I' m playing Oblivion with aliasing atm, just to have the nice lighting effects. HDR is awesome, anyone tried out these tech demos on their PCs? Some of them are beautiful and you can use them to test your PC to see what it can do!
http://kolos.math.uni.lodz.pl/~plastic/productions.aspx http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/#Download Yea, the RAM has a lot to do with it I agree. Much respect to console devs who eventually find ways to get around that with efficient coding.
I was reading about a technique John Carmack (seems to think he) invented called MegaTexturing, where you basically use one huge texture (32000x32000) to paint a landscape and a complex program to fragment and adjust bits of that texture to where it needs to be, rather than using several small unique textures. This way an artist can still get all the unique detail in, by painting it directly onto that one megatexture, without tiling tonnes of details and adjustments on top of each other, thus saving memory. It' s also good for in-game changes to landscape detail, as these changes can also be painted directly onto that texture on the fly, without using any more memory.
Carmack wants it to be used first in Quake Wars: Enemy Territory, but he has a more advanced version coming up in the next iD game... which presumably means it' ll have outdoor stuff too! Yay!
< Message edited by choupolo -- 16 May 06 12:20:34 >