What is "LOD"?

K

Khaydarin

2[H]4U
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Dec 13, 2005
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I know it must be a stupid question......

- but the title says it all. What is LOD and/or LOD bias? What is it used for? What can it be changed to do? Thanks.

- Khay
 
Level of Detail... Pretty self-explanatory I think. The higher it is the more detail your vidcard will render. Err.. At least I think that's how it works.
 
The so called Level of Detail BIAS(LOD BIAS) controls which at which distance from the viewer the switch to lower resolution mip maps takes place (see here for more details about mip maps). The standard value of the LOD BIAS is 0.0 (zero). If you lower the LOD BIAS below zero, the mip map levels are moved farther away, resulting in seemingly sharper textures. But if the scene is moving, the textures start to shimmer.

Because of this, it's not a good idea to use a lower LOD BIAS to improve the sharpness of the image. It's better to use an Anisotropic Filter instead.

Some games force a negative LOD BIAS nevertheless. The result is heavy texture shimmering. To avoid this, the driver can clamp the LOD BIAS to zero. That means that the LOD BIAS can still be raised above zero, but it cannot set lower than zero.
 
Level of detail...a technique used by game developers to reduce the level of detail(by using lower res. versions) of objects, models, etc as one zooms/moves away from it to give better performance w/o player noticing much.
 
MOC said:
The so called Level of Detail BIAS(LOD BIAS) controls which at which distance from the viewer the switch to lower resolution mip maps takes place (see here for more details about mip maps). The standard value of the LOD BIAS is 0.0 (zero). If you lower the LOD BIAS below zero, the mip map levels are moved farther away, resulting in seemingly sharper textures. But if the scene is moving, the textures start to shimmer.

Because of this, it's not a good idea to use a lower LOD BIAS to improve the sharpness of the image. It's better to use an Anisotropic Filter instead.

Some games force a negative LOD BIAS nevertheless. The result is heavy texture shimmering. To avoid this, the driver can clamp the LOD BIAS to zero. That means that the LOD BIAS can still be raised above zero, but it cannot set lower than zero.
Click to expand...

"Shimmering".....

Does that have to do with textures/layers overlapping? Glitching?
 
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