Level of detail or popularly known as LOD is one of the most important parameters in deciding the graphical fidelity of the game and Simplygon are the forefront of delivering automatic tools for optimized level of detail. It’s always a challenge for developers to maintain a balance between delivering an improved LOD without sacrificing polygon count. However with the push in processing power on PS4 and Xbox One, is an optimized level of detail possible without reducing polygon cut?
“You can definitely optimize without reducing the tri-count, but you can also reduce the amount of polys in a mesh, without really affecting how it looks,” Simplygon’s co-founder, Martin Ekdal said to GamingBolt. “For example, with ProxyLOD, you can create a new mesh that looks like the original but is empty (has no triangles) on the inside. This will essentially give you something that looks the same; but has a lot less overdraw.”
“Also, there are other ways of optimizing, and often the tri-count might not be the biggest obstacle – even though every machine has limitations on how many polys it can push.We can for example just optimize the materials/textures or, instead of focusing on polygon reduction, merge objects together to reduce the number of draw calls, which a lot of times is a bigger bottleneck.”
He also revealed that they are also making changes to Simplygon but they are not directly related to PS4 and Xbox One. “We are always making improvements to the system, but nothing so far that is directly related to only PS4 and Xbox One. The biggest “change” (if you can call it that) so far is that developers started using more LOD levels, as the memory increased lots and the processing power is, well, not as increased. This makes it possible to “dial in” the quality/performance ratio better, and is made possible by the automated LOD creation, where manual generation is prohibitively expensive.”
Stay tuned for our full interview with Martin in the coming days. What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments section below.