I’m about to start developing an application using opengl. I am going to take an image that has dimensions of 256 x 256 pixels, and turn each pixel into an open gl cube.
I’m wondering if there’s a way to know how many cubes I can create before the application drops interactivity. A 256 x 256 image would require 65,536 cubes, but I’d like to support images that have dimensions of 1024 x 1024. That would require 1,048,576 cubes.
Will this be possible on consumer graphics boards? I don’t need any other geometry, just these simple cubes.
I’ve been running ~130k polygons on TNT2 + Duron 700MHz at 20-30 FPS (TNT2 does not have hardware T&L).
65k cubes is 768k triangles - I’ve been running >500k meshes with shadowmaps (so >1M polygons rendered) on GeForce 4Ti 4200 at ~15 FPS.
1024x1024 will give 12M triangles - with a little bit of effort you can run this on currently available GPU’s, but with that large number of polygons I suggest avoiding brute-force rendering. Depending on what you actually want to implement you can apply various optimizations.