Mark wrote:
What's the difference between real time and render then? And why does it make a difference?
With rendered, they make a promotional video to market a game. Think cut-scene. It's not what you should actually expect a game to look like.
With a game, you have a 3D environment and with some of the elements in that environment in motion. For each frame, the GPU has to calculate how the world should look from the camera's perspective, so it has to calculate where the rays of light from light sources will go, what surfaces those light rays hit, how that surface is coloured, textured, shaped and what reflectance it has and then work out what's going to happen to each and every one of those light rays and how they will then reflect and perhaps hit other surfaces in the environment and change before eventually heading back to the camera viewpoint.
The number of calculations that need to be performed is huge, for each and every frame. The more time you can devote to processing each frame, the better it will look. With rendering, it's like making a cartoon or stop-animation (wallace & gromit). You chuck a vast amount of very powerful GPU processing time at rendering each frame till it looks amazing, then you save the image of that finished frame. String all the single finished frames together and show them like a movie and you have something that looks amazing and many times better than any GPU could manage. You might have thrown many minutes of rendering time at each frame.
While actually playing a game, a GPU has to render each frame in real time. So a youtube video that shows realtime performance is much closer to showing you what you might actually get with really high-end hardware.
My other Honda runs on grass.....cuts it too.
