/vr/ - Retro Games

>>2321167
Not at all really. Normal mapping/bump mapping is actually heavily abused in 3D games to dramatically lower the polycount of a model for performance reasons just because it's such an easy thing to do. Nearly every single model in a modern 3D game has a normal map, each of those models have textures that are VASTLY larger than, say, the number of pixels it takes to draw an Imp, and on top of drawing the drawing the base image + the normal map on top 3D engines have to take that image and wrap it around a huge mass of polygons (which is the far more expensive process). You could probably fill the screen with normal mapped Imps with the time it takes to render out this image of G-Man at the beginning of Half Life 2.