silikone wrote:Is the application of eight lights not largely variable? Local lights should be more demanding than directional sources, and the amount of geometry being affected by each light is also to be considered.
The 3D Mark test seems to simulate the worst case scenario, with the maximum number of hardware lights all present locally, blending together on a high-poly mesh. I'd imagine that in more practical usage, eight lights would be feasible on this period of hardware with excellent results.
Well, that's the point. I believe it has a 1M poly scene, which was considered extremely high-poly at the time. The sole purpose is to test the T&L performance of the GPU (or CPU in case of software T&L, although by 2001 hardware T&L was commonplace).
I don't think any games actually used anywhere near 8 lights.
But sure, you could think of situations with low enough polycount (and remember that there's attenuation/cutoff for the lights as well, so the lights can be culled altogether on polys that are far away, especially if you use high attenuation factors) that 8 lights are feasible in realtime.
In fact, the high-end GPUs of the time (think GF3/GF4/Radeon 8500) didn't even do all that badly in this test.
In 3DMark2000 there is a similar high poly test by the way, but less heavy, more tailored to first-gen T&L hardware perhaps.