Worthlessness is relative anyway. I would rather see some really nice non-networked client emulating most of the client's functionality taking proper use of both CPU and GPU. Nexon's MapleStory client is EXTREMELY CPU bound leaving the GPU waiting doing nothing, completely wasting its full potential while the CPU is struggling to catch up. If you look at MapleStory with Microsoft's DirectX graphics debugger PIX you'll see that their batching is extremely bad. Most objects and tiles could be put into a texture atlas and all animations should DEFINITELY be sprite sheets. Wizet obviously didn't understand the implications of graphics state switching otherwise they would have never built their animations as separate sprites for each frame and would have improved their batching.
If they had 1 animation which has 100 frames (a little extreme but still a valid example) and then they try to draw it 1000 times where each animated sprite is animating 1 frame ahead of the previous, then EVERY draw call will be treated as a separate batch (effectively immediate batching rather than deferred). That would be 1000 texture state swaps per frame, for the same animation! That's insane! It should be 1 texture swap for the 1 sprite sheet and all of the 1000 animation draw calls should be batched together into a single GPU draw call without any additional state swaps. MapleStory has tons of texture repetition in each map, they barely take advantage of it and the client clearly suffers (their graphics library does handle basic batching of the same texture drawn one exactly after the other but there's a lot unbatched when it should be batched).
From a graphics programmers point of view this type of project definitely isn't worthless.
If they had 1 animation which has 100 frames (a little extreme but still a valid example) and then they try to draw it 1000 times where each animated sprite is animating 1 frame ahead of the previous, then EVERY draw call will be treated as a separate batch (effectively immediate batching rather than deferred). That would be 1000 texture state swaps per frame, for the same animation! That's insane! It should be 1 texture swap for the 1 sprite sheet and all of the 1000 animation draw calls should be batched together into a single GPU draw call without any additional state swaps. MapleStory has tons of texture repetition in each map, they barely take advantage of it and the client clearly suffers (their graphics library does handle basic batching of the same texture drawn one exactly after the other but there's a lot unbatched when it should be batched).
From a graphics programmers point of view this type of project definitely isn't worthless.
