Optimizing Rasterization

• After a clear (or a command to fill a large polygon), send primitives to the geometry engine for processing. Geometry can be prepared as the clear or fill operations take place.

• Texturing is free on a RealityEngine if you use a 16-bit texel internal texture format. There are 16-bit texel formats for each number of components. Using a 32-bit texel format yields half the fill rate of the 16-bit texel formats. See "The Texture Extension" for more information on internal formats.

• The use of detail texture and sharpen texture usually incurs no additional cost and can greatly improve image quality. Note, however, that texture management can become expensive if a detail texture is applied to many base textures. Use detail texture but keep detail and base paired and detail only a few base textures. See "The Sharpen Texture Extension" and "The Detail Texture Extension".

• If textures are changing frequently, use the subtexture extension to incrementally load texture data. RealityEngine systems are optimized for 32 x 32 subimages. See "The Subtexture Extension".

• There is no penalty for using the highest-quality mipmap filter (GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR) if 16-bit texels are used (for example, the GL)RGBA4_EXT internal format). See "The Texture Extension".

• Local lighting or multiple lights are possible without an unacceptable degradation in performance. As you turn on more lights, performance degrades slowly.

• Simultaneous clear of depth and color buffers is optimized in hardware.

• Antialiased lines and points are hardware accelerated.