RE: [GD-Consoles] render cost

[Tom F. <to...@mu...>]

GCN and Xbox are similar enough to the PC architecture that you can use a
common language (especially the Xbox, for obvious reasons). PS2 - completely
alien beast. The slow bit abut the PS2 is managing how your data flows
through the system - it's almost never the actual cost of the rendering,
unless you're doing some really complex things per-vertex. So the cost of "a
texture change" isn't something you can easily define :-)

Tom Forsyth - purely hypothetical Muckyfoot bloke.

This email is the product of your deranged imagination,
and does not in any way imply existence of the author.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: R & D (GameBrains) [mailto:res...@ga...]
> Sent: 19 July 2002 06:34
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: [GD-Consoles] render cost
> 
> 
> Howdy,
> I was wondering if anybody could help me estimate the various 
> tradeoffs in rendering on PS2, GCN and Xbox.  For example, 
> state changes are considered "bad", but how bad are they?  At 
> some point a skin becomes so large that memory page breaks 
> combined with dma transfer time yield multiple smaller 
> textures a more appropriate solution, and how does number of 
> polys factor into this?  Does anybody have any rules of 
> thumbs for the various consoles regarding this type of 
> performance benchmarking?  Finally, is there a "language" for 
> this type of benchmarking?  Is it common to use Big-O 
> notation?  For anybody who is not sure of the cost as a ratio 
> or algorithm, just hard numbers would be helpful too (e.g. 
> our last game had 32 4,000 poly characters on screen @ 60hz 
> each with a different 512x512 8 bit skin, etc.)
> Cheers,
> Brett Bibby
> GameBrains