Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Video Cards
Video cards are a big part of the “hardware” in “hardware rendering.” Video cards
come in lots of different configurations and power combinations. The intricacies
of how a video card works are varied and cards that seem the same (share
the same amount of video RAM) may not actually be identical in their ability
to draw assets. However, for our purposes we will oversimplify and say that
“bigger” cards (cards with more video RAM) are able to draw more information.
“More information” can include a lot of things: more polygons, more textures,
or larger textures. It can also mean dynamic lighting visualization. In all
cases, a video card being able to render more information means that the
complexity of a scene can increase as the video card gets larger.
At this point it is worth noting that the cost of gamer's video cards have become
a very manageable cost in most computers. And in fact, when students come
to me complaining about slow working conditions on their home computer,
the first suggestion I almost always make is to upgrade the video card. One GB
video cards can easily be had for less than $100 and it's a quick and easy way to
empower a computer to show more polygons more quickly.
The technology embedded in video cards evolves so quickly it would be
foolish to try and explain it all in a topic—as soon as it was published the
specs would be outdated. However, generally, there's no need to buy a
workstation card—the gamer's cards usually do quite reasonably and come
with a substantially cheaper price tag.
In my 10-plus years of using Maya, I generally have had better experiences
with NVidia cards. Either ATI or NVidia seem to get along well with Unity;
but NVidia has provided the most predictable experience in authoring
3D elements when using Maya. This is based largely upon anecdotal evidence
of my systems and the systems of a few hundred students, but when buying
or upgrading a card to work with Maya, NVidia has worked better for me.
Limitations and Optimizations for Games
So what does this all mean? With video cards getting bigger and better by the day
and their price tags continually dropping, we should be able to create shapes
with reckless abandon with no concern for the data set we are creating. Right?
Well, unfortunately, no. For years, the implied promise of instantaneous
output of trillions of polygons always seems to be just over the horizon.
Computers get faster, video cards get bigger, and it seems like the process
of drawing polygons would become a nonissue, one that just happened
flawlessly behind the scenes. However, what has happened is that as
computers got faster new things became possible. Suddenly, game
engines could start using dynamic lighting (a light bulb swings around
in the scene and the objects and walls reflect this change), reflections
became the norm (which really means that everything in the scene gets
