Wave Issue 9811 4/24/98 Article 6-01

***Sven Technologies Announces Multi-Resolution Geometry
(January 21)

Sven Technologies introduces the release of the Multi-Resolution
Geometry (MRG) API for 3D game and content developers. MRG
yields faster rendering speeds while improving the visual
fidelity of dynamic 3D scenes.

MRG is a real-time, continuous level of detail control system.
3D objects within MRG-enabled scenes automatically and smoothly
gain and lose resolution depending on their proximity to the
viewer and other parameters that the developer controls. MRG
increases frame rate by varying the number of polygons it draws
for a given object when the object is nearby, it is drawn with a
large number of polygons; when it is far, it is drawn with much
fewer. MRG smoothly adds and removes polygons without object
popping. At the same time, MRG enhances the visual fidelity of a
3D scene by permitting developers to use much higher polygon-
count objects than they currently can.

Multi-Resolution Geometry improves frame rate by 1.5x or more
for typical 3D game configurations.

MRG is comprised of three main components:
- the preprocessing kernel which calculates the continuous level
of detail representation for each object.
- the run-time polygon manager that up-reses and down-reses each
model between frames without storing explicit representations of
each object at every level.
- and the run-time polygon allocator which takes factors such as
distance to camera, speed, and priority and manages the overall
per-frame distribution of polygons.

www.sven-tech.com