How so? Trees can be made out of any number of polygons. Modern games, for those of us not stuck in the 90s, are made of lots.
You never heard/read of a term/word "example" did you?
You state an obvious thing then you proceed to make a out of touch assumption (indirectly) about me despite the discussion being about Saturn, triangle and quad rendering. Yet you didn't bother to read by seeing what you wrote thus you didn't grasp the motive/theme of discussion...
Textures are applied to fragments, not polygons.
You just said what I have described in a different way, when I said 12 triangles and 6 quads which I basically said that they are fragments. I said basically what you said...
Better and correct way would be a piece or faces or surface rather than fragment which would mean it isn't part of the mesh/model...
For those of us not stuck in the 90s.
Again you proceed to make a out of touch assumption (indirectly) about me despite the discussion being about Saturn, triangle and quad rendering. Yet you didn't bother to read by seeing what you wrote thus you didn't grasp the motive/theme of discussion...
If rendering the same texture to a number of faces, that texture sits in cache and is applied per-pixel. It makes no odds what the geometry type is.
...And? Textures are applied to faces that have varying angles thus the engine/GPU needs to calculate how to apply to each face. Having a texture in cache means faster calls/draws, the shorter the more you can apply.
Edges don't mean squat.
What edges? Its was about amount of polygons for a object in triangle and quad rendering...
24 triangles to look round is probably a pretty good number, for the 90s.
Again you proceed to make a out of touch assumption (indirectly) about me despite the discussion being about Saturn, triangle and quad rendering. Yet you didn't bother to read by seeing what you wrote thus you didn't grasp the motive/theme of discussion...
This explains a lot.
There are plenty of reasons to prefer triangles. They always exist in a plane, whereas four vertices can have a third dimension. A triangle always subdivides to another triangle, and a new polygon can always be created by adding just one more vertex to two others, whereas a quad can be subdivide into a quad and a triangle, while you have to add two vertices in the same plane to create a quad. Every other polygon can be expressed as triangles, but quads can't express all polygons - how many quads do you need to express a triangle or heptagon? To create triangles, you have to overlap two quad vertices which is making it a triangle! Triangles are easier to work with in the realtime engine, more mathematically 'atomic', and focussing performance on pushing triangles means accelerating all geometry to the same degree.
You mention modern games yet with amount of detail that they are pushing could be made of quads entirely and since quads haven't been used in games since Saturn, I doubt there was any effort to create an efficient way of rendering quads in this day and age.... For all we know quad's could match triangles in performance. Yet Ethatron pointed out that Tesselation with quad's has almost no impact to performance thus Quad Tesselation Rendering has potential to outperform Triangle Tesselation Rendering