+- Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums (https://forums.dolphin-emu.org)
+-- Forum: Dolphin Emulator Discussion and Support (https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Forum-dolphin-emulator-discussion-and-support)
+--- Forum: Development Discussion (https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Forum-development-discussion)
+--- Thread: Does the Wii Support On-The-Fly Polygon Subdivision? (/Thread-does-the-wii-support-on-the-fly-polygon-subdivision)
Does the Wii Support On-The-Fly Polygon Subdivision? - JakoNintenCraft - 10-25-2018
I am currently trying to write a homebrew demo to render a subdivided plane displaced by a heightmap (in other words a dynamically generated terrain). Given that I want to lower the amount of vertices on-screen as much as possible, I have investigated on-the-fly subdivision of the displaced plane as a solution. According to what I have read so far the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS support the feature by hardware, but I am unsure that the Wii does the same or not. If not, I'd have to find a way to make it happen in software, which I don't know the performance implications of.
Are there any games that use this feature (dynamic mesh subdivision) on the Wii, and if not is it possible to do at all feasibly? The technique is used in several open-world games to make their terrains less processor-intensive, going back to the Xbox 360 days, but with so few (if any) open-world Wii games, I've been stuck with little to look at.
Thanks.
P.S.: Just in case it might be confusing to some, I do not mean the use of Level of Detail (LoD) models. That is relatively easy to implement; I mean real-time polygon subdivision of a low-poly mesh.
Also this is my first post.
RE: Does the Wii Support On-The-Fly Polygon Subdivision? - gamemasterplc - 10-25-2018
It is definitely possible if you can deal with sending more vertices to the GPU.
RE: Does the Wii Support On-The-Fly Polygon Subdivision? - JakoNintenCraft - 10-25-2018
(10-25-2018, 11:01 AM)gamemasterplc Wrote: It is definitely possible if you can deal with sending more vertices to the GPU.
Are there any examples of the technology being used, such as in retail games, that I could look at?
RE: Does the Wii Support On-The-Fly Polygon Subdivision? - AnyOldName3 - 10-25-2018
On the PC, the technology is usually called tessellation and is only possible in hardware with at least DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4, but can always be done in software. To do it on the Wii, you're definitely going to have to do it in software.
RE: Does the Wii Support On-The-Fly Polygon Subdivision? - JakoNintenCraft - 10-25-2018
(10-25-2018, 08:53 PM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: On the PC, the technology is usually called tessellation and is only possible in hardware with at least DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4, but can always be done in software. To do it on the Wii, you're definitely going to have to do it in software.
I meant if there were any Wii games that used the tech, but thanks regardless.
RE: Does the Wii Support On-The-Fly Polygon Subdivision? - MayImilae - 10-25-2018
Ahhh no GPU people responded. I guess I'll answer with what I know!
The GameCube and Wii very very much do not support subdivision or tessellation in hardware. The ArtX GPU is very flexible with billions upon billions of different possible configurations, but none of them do tessellation. No one had really even thought of the feature yet, as the analog SD displays of the period meant that games just wouldn't benefit from it!
However, thanks to its unified memory setup, it is possible for the CPU to make edits and essentially brute force tessellation in software, but I am not aware of any titles that do anything remotely like that.
RE: Does the Wii Support On-The-Fly Polygon Subdivision? - AnyOldName3 - 10-26-2018
(10-25-2018, 09:45 PM)MayImilae Wrote: No one had really even thought of the feature yet, as the analog SD displays of the period meant that games just wouldn't benefit from it!
ATI TruForm was a technology that let you do hardware tessellation on the PC way back in 2001, so people had definitely thought of it. No one used it for ages, though, both because of the reason you said, and because no one uses proprietary OpenGL/Direct3D extensions unless they come from Nvidia.