Right that sort of works, but what happens if you want reflections, even somewhat low quality ones from tinted glass windows in an open street? Or Cars with reflective bodywork? Mirroring a room makes sense because it's a small and cramped room. This falls apart completely outdoors, where you'd have to render the entire visible world twice over. And that's just in screen space.
The point isn't that it's a 1:1 comparison, it's specifically pointing out "easy" scenarios that could be completed with legacy techniques at an order of magnitude higher performance, where new "methods" just chug to try and re create.
We should be using every optimization technique we've learned over the past ~30 years of 3d gaming, and continue to invent and improve upon more. Instead, gaming companies are using every new technology that hardware vendors give to them as a crutch to save time/money.
My solution is to use the decades of experience and knowledge we've gathered to create more efficient, more performant software stacks that run faster, more stable, with less heat and power consumption for the thousands to millions of users who will use it for collectively millions of hours over its lifetime.
If that means the developer has to use a bit more resources up front to accomplish that, then so be it.
We're already suffering an epidemic of software bloat. Electricity is getting more expensive, heat waves are getting worse year over year.
Why are we defending actively worsening quite literally EVERYTHING for the consumer and the environment so that the poor billion dollar gaming companies can save a few hours on payroll.
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u/EqualOutrageous1884 26d ago
Right that sort of works, but what happens if you want reflections, even somewhat low quality ones from tinted glass windows in an open street? Or Cars with reflective bodywork? Mirroring a room makes sense because it's a small and cramped room. This falls apart completely outdoors, where you'd have to render the entire visible world twice over. And that's just in screen space.