What is the solution?
A combination of hardware and software
- Faster front-side bus!
- Display lists - graphics board reads stored vertices from memory
- BUT 95% of real applications use immediate mode
- Smart applications should do everything reduce the amount of vertex data to be processed by the graphics pipeline
- High-level bounding box and occlusion culling
- Level of detail management
- High level Fahrenheit APIs provide this kind of functionality
- Vertex Compression
- Pack normals and colors into minimum accuracy fields
- Entropy encoding of vertex stream