Lights not always showing "on" but are

[TheKitchenAbode]

9 hours ago, Chopsaw said:

 

It is interesting that all video cards seem to have the same limit.  It just does not make sense. GTX 1080 should do more.

 

Graham  seems to be quite sure of his facts but I am not convinced.

 

 

 

The limitation has been imposed by the graphics card manufacturer and is related to Open Gl. If you check out the detailed specs for the cards you will find this 8 light max. You can also see this in CA under preferences, video card. CA extracts this info from the card. When I dug into this a bit deeper it appears that there is no reason that Open GL can't handle more than 8 active lights. Supposedly most software companies have moved away from using the Open GL light function and use other much more efficient shader methods for lighting effects. As such, it appears that the card manufacture's have decided that there is no need for more than 8 lights when using Open GL. I'm just the messenger here!!!

 

 

[cv2702]

KTA is right: OpenGL apparently has no restrictions itself as to Max lights.  But GPU processing of lights is quite complex and older GPUs would struggle with more than 8.

 

It seems that Khronos' Vulkan (info here) is a likely successor to OpenGL-xx and OpenCL.  Nvidia had already implemented Vulkan at Vulkan' launch and AMD is also on board.  It will be interesting to see what Nvidia does with CUDA in the future.

 

When searching CA support, there is no hit on 'Vulkan'.  Anyone know what CA's intentions are?