The Geometry Behind Normal Maps

> If we could afford a polygon for every pixel we wouldn’t need textures at all.

Heh; with mesh shaders and Nanite, we sort of can now. Whether older GPUs can render them is a different matter altogether though.

On a 1080p display, there are ~2M pixels; this is a totally tractable number of triangles to do at 60fps even on cards that are like 10 years old. If I remember correctly, a buddy of mine was recently doing 6 million triangles in realtime on integrated, which is absolute bananacakes. The compute-based software rasterizers people are writing now (Nanite) target triangles that end up being 2-4px on-screen, so we're talking something on the order of 500k-1M triangles. Modern GPUs fart a million triangles.

We've been in 'kind of can' territory for a long time in terms of hardware capabilities. We're just now writing the software to actually do it.