Programming
Trends in the advancement of game hardware show that processing speed increases faster than RAM size and DMA bandwidth. Today, especially on PlayStation2, we see that math calculations and triangle rasterization are no longer the bottlenecks: it is availability of RAM and DMA transfer speed that limit our engines. Future systems are likely to have transformation and rasterization so fast that RAM and DMA limits are even more obvious. This talk presents a technique for dealing with "incredibly dense meshes" where one might imagine it to be nearly impossible to move the data around in real time. The technique borrows from many well-known disciplines, including wavelets, subdivision surfaces, and height fields. The result is a method for authoring, storing, and rendering dense meshes that may have one million triangles or more, assuming very fast transformation hardware and comparatively small RAM and slow DMA.