you want 60fps and alpha blended trees and hair? seesh.

Don't hear what the rambo guy says, go for it, one day it'll become true no matter what. By the way, how is that Black Hound project going? Sure it's a lot of work, I did a small story with 1 hour gameplay and it took me 3 months, of course you're a pro, but the sea is waiting, summertime and the living is easy... Know that many people are looking for it.

Regards

Novalis

Yes ! We want !

I think it would be entirely reasonable to settle for below 60 fps as many games already do. I believe the GTA series and Halo run at 30 fps, off the top of my head, but you could easily opt for 45 or something, depending on the framerate sacrifice (if any) required for better transparency techniques.

I'd say this is especially true for games which don't operate in first person view (e.g. Aliens RPG).

It's all well and good to aim for as high a framerate as possible (within the monitor refresh rate) as far as it actually improves graphical quality perceptibly, but high framerates shouldn't be an end in and of themselves.

/2 cents and all

45Hz actually isn't a framerate unless your renderer is really weird. A monitor refreshes at 60Hz. There are no subdivisions of this, it just refreshes 60 times a second. Anything you render has to be displayed during a refresh, which means that any framerate must divide 60 by an integer. 60Hz, 30Hz, 20Hz, 15Hz, 12.5Hz, 10Hz... If something is displaying 45fps, that means that every two frames, one is a 30Hz frame and one is a 60Hz frame, which is wonky. It can happen under certain conditions, but it's probably not a sign of a healthy renderer. (Or the vertical retrace synch is turned off because you like higher FPS numbers more seeing half of the last frame and half of the next frame on your screen at the same time.)

Anyhow, using alpha testing (1-bit alpha) instead of alpha blending gets you a big render savings (blending is slow) and also sorts properly automatically (because it can use a depth buffer). If you really want blended hair that doesn't look wonky from some angles you also have to break it up into little pieces and make sure the draw back to front (either via many draw calls, or with a dynamic vertex buffer).

Alpha testing is just faster to render and easier to make for an artist.