Is it only possible to display 64k vertices on the monitor with 16bit?

Posted by Aufziehvogel on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Aufziehvogel
Published on 2012-12-02T16:02:08Z Indexed on 2012/12/02 17:22 UTC
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I did the first 3D tutorial over at riemers.net and stumbled upon that my graphic card only supports Shader 2.0 (Reach profile in XNA) which means I can only use Int16 to store the indices (triangle to vertex).

This means that I can only store 2^16 = 65536 vertices. Also I read on the internet that you should prefer 16-bit over 32-bit because not all hardware (like mine) does support 32-bit.

Yet, I am wondering: Do really all game scenes get along with only so little vertices? I though already faces of people used a lot of polygons (which are made up of vertices?).

It’s not relevant for me yet, but I am interested:

  • Do game scenes use only 65536 vertices?
  • Do you use some trade-off to display more (e.g. 64k in GPU buffer rest on RAM)
  • Is there some method to get more into the GPU buffer? I already read on some other posts that there seems to be a limit of 64k per mesh too, so maybe you can compact stuff to meshes?

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