Love the “Really Expensive ™”—
Fully agreed that the quality/design of implementation has everything to do with ease of coding/performance.
On a further tangent, wonder if we’ll see any sort of unification between vertices and pixels in the near future? Maybe something like atom-modeling or multi-textured-voxels?
I hear many people speak about 3d hardware heading towards greater programability with increasing complexity in vertex/pixel operations (displacement mappin), more texture stages, as well as greater intermediate capabilities (higher bit-count for screen pixels / render-to-many-textures / etc.
I’m stuck thinking that hardware would have a lot to offer if we could render geometry to a ‘geometry texture/vertex buffer’, just as we render pixels. It could be pretty powerful for high-density complex animations/impacts/deformations as well as LOD stuff-
In any case, all this talk about shader-implementations really makes ya think 'bout what might be between today’s shaders and tommorow’s holodeck.
It’d be excellent if any of the HW guys who are close to this could speculate~