How are video games rendered?

[abhay6547]

So I work with a lot of 3D applications like Cinema 4D and I know that when I have to render something with a high level of detail, it can sometimes take hours to render a single frame. How do video games manage to render a frame in high detail in mere fractions of a second? I assume it has something to do with pre-rendering and only rendering the visible polygons but I am not sure. I would love it if someone were to explain this to me.

[flibberdipper]

Well, the game is already "prerendered", so to speak. It put the textures in the VRAM, and then the GPU pulls them off, compiles them, and displays them on the screen, in my basic understanding of this.

[NInety]

Different type of rendering.

 

Pre-Rendering= 3D application

Realtime= Video Game

[Tr3vor]

So I work with a lot of 3D applications like Cinema 4D and I know that when I have to render something with a high level of detail, it can sometimes take hours to render a single frame. How do video games manage to render a frame in high detail in mere fractions of a second? I assume it has something to do with pre-rendering and only rendering the visible polygons but I am not sure. I would love it if someone were to explain this to me.

 

Yeah, GPUs nowdays do something called "Z-Culling" I think. Its where the GPU decides what is visible to the "camera" and renders only those polygons and throws away the rest.

 

also from what I've seen, when rendering realtime there are a lot less polygons in general. LoD helps speed up the process a bit by turning far away things into low detail objects. that's why there is annoying popup sometimes.

[SSL]

Because the detail in a video game is often an illusion. A lot of fine three-dimensional detail is achieved through two-dimensional means such as normal maps, parallax, or tessellation, which modern graphics cards can render very quickly compared to high-poly meshes. Lighting is usually less detailed and realistic; not all sources will cast shadows, for example.

[Ciccioo]

a lot of rendering softwares relay on CPU for pre-rendering, in fact all the videoeditors out there want to have 6 cores ivy-E

some programs should be able to use GPU acceleration too, but i'm not into video editing, i can't tell which ones

games, on the other side, use all the GPU POWAH, think of it as a heavily downclocked 2048 cores i7