Image Courtesy: r/witcher
In today’s gaming world, we are always mesmerized by the graphic quality of the games. The beauty and complexity it offers in the gaming world is commendable.
From the flourishing greenery in the map to the city with lots of skyscraper buildings, developers devote their serious efforts to create these immense visuals in the game.
However, rendering all these graphics fidelity requires a lot of processing power, leading you to spent hefty amount on GPUs and powerful CPUs.
Also, it leads to the sluggish and choppy frame rates in the game.
This is where the LOD comes into the play. LOD stands for Level of Detail. This allows developers to bring a perfect balance between visuals and performance.
LOD is the technique which helps developers achieve the balance in level of details inside the game environment.
LOD works by smartly adjusting the details of objects based on their distance from the player.
Imagine a vast forest area surrounding your player, now when you are standing among them, each tree would be rendered in complex detail with tons of polygons for more crisp image.
The closer the trees are to the player, the more detailed it will appear e.g., depth in textures and rendering individual leaves.
But, as the distance of trees increases from your player, LOD switches to a simpler version with fewer polygons, reducing the details in trees, as the trees far from you wouldn’t require that much level of detailing.
This is what LOD does to the 3D models.
Here is a picture of shack for reference.
This helps to reduce the strain on your GPU, to improve your frame rates. The game engine switches to a lower LOD level so seamlessly that it is unnoticeable for players. Helping you to have smooth gameplay in the environments filled with countless objects.
Also Read: Why is Retro gaming so popular?
Now, if you understood what exactly is LOD, then I am sure you will pretty well understand why it is very important for your game settings.
Below I will give you some of the aspects where it implements very much and is important for overall performance:
LOD plays very crucial role in giving you better performance inside the game.
Imagine if you are playing Spider Man 2 and the city skyline in the game, they render every small detail on each building, from windowpanes to rooftop antennas. Then it would be a big burden on your graphics card.
And this will lead to the stuttering FPS and frame drops. With LOD the closer buildings can be rendered with intricate details and the far buildings can be rendered with basic textures, without going into the small detailing.
By displaying simpler versions of distant buildings, LOD makes space for your graphics card, which can be utilized by other aspects of the game. To ultimately give you better performance with more FPS, without compromising in graphic quality.
Most of the AAA games offers open world environments, and rendering every detail of these games would be a disaster for your gaming PC.
This is where the LOD becomes a game-changer.
By using different level of details, with various polygons, LOD allows developers to create huge and stunning open world maps in the game, without sacrificing performance.
Imagine a desert, town or a lush green forest, you can explore the endless possibilities of open world games seamlessly by transitioning between the distant and closer objects.
LOD is very essential for creating open world landscapes of AAA games.
LOD doesn’t just merely improves frame rates. But, by reducing the complexity in distant objects, it helps optimize your system memory usage.
As loading detailed 3D models require hefty amount of memory usage, and LOD with fewer polygons to process ensures that only the necessary items in your game loads into the system memory, that also for a given particular time.
It frees a lot of memory usage which helps optimizing your game for faster loading time and less system crashes and slowdowns.
Take a moment to look at the below pictures comparing with high-LOD 3D model and low-LOD 3D model.
In this picture of mountain, you can see clearly how the closer looking mountain on the right side have more detailing compared to the left-side of the image of distant mountains with less details.
Take a look into these images of high detailing and low detailing graphics. Now imagine looking towards a distant forest. Those same trees won't require the same level of details.
I hope now you understand, what exactly LOD does in your game and why it is very important for your games to run smoothly.
The art of balancing LOD in the game lies in achieving the sweet spot between performance and the graphics.
If lower LOD models is implemented aggressively then with improving performance it will create a jarring experience for players. Making the game graphics more pixelated or blocky.
And, if the vice versa is done then it will heavily affect the performance.
To make sure players get natural look, transitions between LOD levels need to be smooth and subtle.
This could be achieved by blending the techniques of both high and low detail 3D models during the transition. Making it seamless visual experience for players.
In conclusion, LOD is very important for modern video games. It allows developers to develop mega projects with huge open worlds, like GTA, RDR and many more without sacrificing with the smooth gameplay.
By intelligently adopting the level of details in the game’s elements based on their distance, LOD make sure to provide smooth gameplay experience for gamers.
And in future as graphics of the game will move towards more advancements, the gap between low LOD and high LOD models will shrink. This will make the user experience even better.
In this article, I have tried to explain about LOD in gaming, in detailed way with example and screenshots. Hope it made you clear on the work of LOD in video games.