Few months ago I had an argue with a colleague of mine of whether we still will be using triangles in 10 (or 15) years. While I naturally opposed the idea, I feel there is something into it. So why are we using triangles, really?
Saving by calculating in VS and interpolating in PS
In fact, this is less and less is a viable argument. Nowadays characters already feature near-to-one-pixel triangles. We are actually LOOSING in this case: we get 4-fold PS cost and even rasterizer choking on some architectures. Besides, one modern architectures VS parameter cache is a bottleneck, so it is even less expensive to recompute a view position in a PS, than calculate it in VS and interpolate.
To match DCC tools
It is actually quite awkward to model your characters with triangles - a lot of artists use tools like ZBrush where they sculpt with spheres instead.
Clipping/culling
Once again - it is not really optimal when you triangles become very tiny. Besides, one might use bounding volumes for other representations to clip invisible surface.
I probably see how one can gain benefit for fx/billboards - but that's quite a specific case. Again, overdraw due to unused space on those is a big issue.
All in all, to support triangles we now have a lot of overhead - VS, sometimes tessellation, rasterization - while sometimes they are nearly equivalent to final pixels (and this trend seem to continue).
I am curious to hear your opinions and rationales guys. Will triangles live forever or will be replaced with something else (voxels? splats?) in a decade or two?
Hard to tell. It is easy to think in terms of triangles when we experiment with different algorithms, because of algrotithms than extend naturally on any complex surfaces constructed from triangles. When some convinient replacement will emerge, it will replace triangles due to the reasons you mentioned, I guess.
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