New driver idea?

[gibber]

Since "mid-range" cards like the 6800GT, 6600GT, 7900GT, and now 8800GTS 320 all seem to have run (then) current games either well or even perfectly with eye candy turned on, it seems like faster cards/SLI were/are only needed when playing at very high resolutions? So, why not make a "comprimise" video driver which would do this:

Render most of the scene at say, 50% resolution and "upscale" it, except, in some key small areas like edges and thin lines render those parts at full resolution to reduce aliasing?

That would probably look a lot better, in the end, than simply running at 1/2 the resolution, in case the game wouldn't run quite fast enough at the full "native" resolution (on my 8800GTS 320). I'd like to be able to do at least 4x AA and it's nice to turn on features like fancy water rippling/reflections, volumetric shadows, etc...

I've got a 1680 x 1050 resolution monitor, I'm thinking maybe some of the latest games won't run quite as fast as I would like at the full res. with max settings and rather than run at a lower res, I'd like to have video mode like this.

Also, how about rendering the edges of the scene (not just LOD based on distance) in less detail, just like the human eye? (Our eyes are much sharper in the center of our vision). I'd like to have a FPS game where the center of the screen was super sharp, thuse making it easier to aim at far away targets, no need for the peripheral part of my vew to be that sharp.

 

[Arcygenical]

Everything you suggested requires a lot of computational power to determine whether or not an object should be rendered at full quality... I just don't see the overhead being worth the gain.

 

[gibber]

Everything you suggested requires a lot of computational power to determine whether or not an object should be rendered at full quality... I just don't see the overhead being worth the gain.

Do you really think so? I don't think you're correct at all, for some aspects, particularly about rendering objects in the center of the FOV at higher detail, the computation needed for determining which part of the scene is in the middle would be inconsequential.

And I thought I heard about edge detection utilized in rendering in the past, with all the leaps and bounds in GPU power recently shouldn't it be even easier now?

Consider how some SLI modes work currently, already doing calculations to determine which card a particular portion of the scene goes to - adapting proportionally how much of each frame goes to each card when one part becomes more complex than the other...

It would certainly be insignificant overhead to simply have flags for certain object types which set which mode they got rendered in.

Some games look beautiful on my 32" TV through SVGA, partially because they weren't "jaggy" looking. The TV has a blurring effect which smooths out the image. If you could emulate that smoothness in most of the scene without sacrificing detail in the areas where it counted, that'd be great.

It's disturbing to sometimes find that a game running at high resolution on a sharp LCD screen doesn't look as nice as an old game like Soul Calibur II on Dreamcast (it was nicely anti-aliased) did on my old TV 'cause they're all jaggedy.

 

[Dark Shade]

I think more games should take more CPU processing power, especially with all of these extra cores going unused (for the most part) while playing a game. Few games take full advantage of multiple cores, might as well make a gaming experience use your total computer instead of 4/5ths of it

 

[gibber]

I think more games should take more CPU processing power, especially with all of these extra cores going unused (for the most part) while playing a game. Few games take full advantage of multiple cores, might as well make a gaming experience use your total computer instead of 4/5ths of it

Agree totally ~ consider the typical MMORPG - can you even do something so simple as:

dig a hole in the ground
cut down a tree and build something out of it
interact with DECENT AI characters
make a road, a fence, build an inn and start your own town

there's only one game I can think of where you can even do any of those ~ I forget the name of it, but it's not really a RPG (edit: I remember now, Second Life, I think it's called, didn't like it much, and I thought WoW was crap)

and how long have we been waiting to have a FPS where when you shoot walls, doors, things, it actually causes damage - "real world physics"?

If you shoot a door (any door) enough times, you should be able to bust through it, same with a wall, or a box.

You ought to be able to do these things on at least a basic level, on a quad core CPU?