Team lrn introductionp tween complexity and performance

Team LRN

Level of detail is as relevant today as ever, for despite tremendous strides in graphics hardware, the tension between fidelity and speed continues to haunt us. The complexity of our 3D models—measured most commonly by the number of polygons—seems to grow faster than the ability of our hardware to render them. No matter how powerful our platform, the number of polygons we want always seems to exceed the number of polygons we can afford. The problem may be sheer complexity: for example, Figure 1.1 shows several massive models ranging from handmade CAD, to procedurally generated geometry, to laser scans of real objects. All are too complex to render interactively with any machine available to date. The problem may be

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