Draw Distance Question

[BeeIzebub]

OK, heres a question that I need answered to prove some people wrong.

For video games, they set the draw distance, which is the area which is rendered, am I right? Anything past this Draw Distance is not sent to the video card and therefore no driver modification can make you render past the draw distance. For Example, people are saying that editing drivers can make you have a larger draw distance in battlefield vietnam/42 and allow you to see super far. This is not possible am I right? There are settings in the game for Draw Distance and that determines what is rendered and what is not am I right? In this game there are certain maps that have different draw distances, how would the driver know that just because you switched maps, it must render differently? I say its because the game knows what the draw distance is and it tells the video card what to render. So therefore the games draw distance can only be changed by editing the GAMES files, am I right?

 

[CleanSlate]

In my experience it is a combination of the two. So, it's feasible that changing the drivers could in fact let you see long distances but the upper length of those distances would be determined by the game engine/files.

~Adam

 

[Scali]

Anything past this Draw Distance is not sent to the video card and therefore no driver modification can make you render past the draw distance.

That depends on how it's implemented. Normally the draw distance is just the position of the far z plane of the frustum. It depends on how the engine handles frustum culling.
In the simplest case, when there's no frustum culling, then the polygons aren't discarded until the clipping stage of the renderer. In that case, moving the z plane back will make these polygons visible.

If the engine does some kind of frustum culling, it depends on how it does it... If it takes the frustum info from the driver, then it will still work fine... if it doesn't, then it depends on how it culls... Generally culling is not done per-polygon because that is way too slow... It's only done per-object or even group of objects... So those objects that aren't culled, because they are at least partially inside the frustum, will be drawn with the new distance.

So you're right... The only way to guarantee that the draw distance actually works 100% is to edit the game itself so it will use the proper distance during culling.
Else it may still work, at least partially.

 

[darkpark]

i've seen this draw distance (sometimes called view distance) in a few games and from my understanding it sets how far you can see. whatever you CAN see is rendered by the video card and anything further isn't. as far as i know, this is specific to the game and there is nothing you can do to the video drivers to change how far you can see. the game controls what gets rendered in that it sends data to the driver which in turn sends data to the video card to perform the rendering.

 

[Shieze]

I think the driver "can" effect it. I have done some opengl work but I never played with draw distance (far clip plane) in opengl. If it is done through the api then the driver could effect this I believe.