Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Good riddance displacement maps....

JoePublic opened this issue on Nov 03, 2013 · 28 posts


bhoins posted Mon, 18 November 2013 at 9:47 AM

Quote - > Quote - ...Displacement maps are part of the shader, which is render engine specific. Morphs are not. Further Maps take up significantly more Graphics card memory than morphs, which when dealing with real time rendering or GPU rendering, like Octane or DirectX, very quickly becomes a limiting factor.

DirectX11.2 is not limited by Video Card memory, it can use tiled resources which will allow your main system RAM to be used without the massive slowdown seen in older versions. Tiled resources are a hardware requirement.

The code to check if your video card supports it is in the programming guide.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/bg182880.aspx  <<< DX11.2 Guide

AMD/ATI 7000 up cards support it with a bios update. None of my Nvidia cards support it yet, (Some Nvidia ones do right out of the box) but I am sure that they will at some point. (Jury still out if older ones by a bios update or new card)

DirectX versions usually don't get a lot of use for the first couple of years because of the hardware requirements. IE: You need a new card.....

People say that DirectX will never get much use every time a new version is released. Then support appears on every brand of GPU.......

This time AMD/ATI cards have the ability to support it without replacing the hardware. Hopefully current Nvidia hardware will as well.

Still leaves Maps taking up significant Graphics card memory, or slowing you down for Texture spooling, and losing the "real time rendering" advantage.  There is a reason games, and things that rely on real time rendering, use as few maps as possible, and this is precisely that reason. 

You are not going to be using 11 maps at, effectively, 4096x4096, and 4 maps at 2048x2048 and get what you are looking for. Note that is the V4 High Res set, no clothes, no hair and presumes the render engine loads each texture map only once. 

Considering that newer texture sets, or newer characters use significantly more maps, to include Displacement, Normal, SSS and Transluency maps.

Morphs are significantly better at this.

The entire Poser paradigm will have to be changed to properly support Real Time Rendering.