Importance of Clipping in Video Games
Good clipping strategy is important in the development of video games in order to maximize the game's frame rate and visual quality. Despite GPU chips that are faster every year, it remains computationally expensive to transform, texture, and shade polygons, especially with the multiple texture and shading passes common today. Hence, game developers must live within a certain "budget" of polygons that can be drawn each video frame.
To maximize the game's visual quality, developers prefer to establish the highest possible polygon budget; therefore, every optimization of the graphics pipeline benefits the polygon budget and therefore the game.
In video games, then, clipping is a critically important optimization that speeds up the rendering of the current scene, and therefore allows the developer to increase the renderer's polygon budget. Programmers often devise clever heuristics to speed up the clipper, as it would be computationally prohibitive to use line casting or ray tracing to determine with 100% accuracy which polygons are and are not within the camera's field of view. One of the most popular methods for optimization is the use of octrees to partition scenes into rendered and non-rendered areas.
The clipping problems introduced by reflective surfaces are generally avoided in games as of 2005 by simulating reflections without actually doing all the calculations that would be necessary for accurate reflections.
Due to the use of the term 'no clipping' to refer to turning off collision detection, the two are often confused.
Read more about this topic: Clipping (computer Graphics)
Famous quotes containing the words video games, importance of, importance, video and/or games:
“I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“In my public statements I have earnestly urged that there rested upon government many responsibilities which affect the moral and spiritual welfare of our people. The participation of women in elections has produced a keener realization of the importance of these questions and has contributed to higher national ideals. Moreover, it is through them that our national ideals are ingrained in our children.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past—the portrayals of family life on such television programs as “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” and all the rest.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)