Why are we tied to Triangles?

David Shaw


28 June 2013 · Dumbarton


Hi guys, been thinking about graphics recently over the last few weeks.. did you know in the early days there was two graphics systems for drawing pixels?

let me explain... back, ..waay-back-when 70's/80's the graphics for games was very rudimentary, at some point around the 80's there was a choice by the industry.. involving how a 3d game could be made, the industry chose 'Polygons' a system involving triangles to draw 3D pictures, but there was another system called 'Vauxhallite' it was much like asteroids, and was a technology based on 'pixel for pixel' on screen, very basic and going with Polygons was very much a smart choice on the part of the industry. .. but today.. things are different..why? because now we have high pixel density TV's and Monitors.


The technology itself, it much like a very super tiny search engine, it goes from graphics card to screen and back, checking the pixel is where it supposed to be, this improves performance dramatically (as seen in a Youtube video I can no longer find..flip!) but anyways.. Polygons were a very very smart way of doing things, it uses a triangulation to create an environment, we might not see it but it's there ever so tiny, Pythagorean law, the industry had to made this choice or we would have had asteroids for 20 years, and a lack of gusto in the finance of games. but that's the crux I'm trying to share with you guys today.. performance wise it makes no to sense to use polygons now, and inside the cards there is much much wasted performance, as the card draws the whole triangle not just the parts we see on screen, all of that energy wasted on parts we can never see. but we are stuck now with this system as everything is based on polygons, and I DO mean everything from every API, DX OpenGL, to every tool, Game engines even the people involved in the creation of games, programmers, texture artists.. all know and use polygons. as PFP (pixel-for-pixel) has NO infrastructure, it can never be.. which is.. what can I say?? it makes soo much sense for us right now.. 1 screen pixel = 1 internal process.. but much like the train model in BTTF.. we have passed the point of 'no return' no doc brown can save us now.. unless OpenGL team come up with a Flux Capacitor. but that said.. I would like to say to all of the heavy hitters should you wonder in and read this.. AMD Intel Nvidia (Via and Sis to a much lesser extent).. first one to crack this.. will win the whole pot. plain and simple. you increase your performance 300% overnight without loss. really, i mean that. without loss. There is modified Vauxhallite demo online out there somewhere.. Ive seen it.. they used a very low end gpu/igp (i think it was an intel one) to go SuperHD, no frame loss or stuttering.. that is something using Vauxhallites can kill stone dead.. it adds smoothness of the likes that we can only dream of..and that's maybe what this is a dream...






peace. Dava

NB: since the time of this post I have changed some of my opinion on this. 08/05/2014