Sins Forums
ive looked around the forums but i cant figure out whats the graphical difference between turning on bump and turning it off.
any pics to show me the difference? thanks.
Bump mapping. It's a rendering technique that makes the textures on ships, structures and planets appear to have bumps and depressions. The link has a picture that explains more than two thousands of my words 
I thought it meant the quality of the way ships and structures 'bump' into each other =P as in, whether they pass through each other as though neither were there, or whether they glance off realistically...
idn, dont quote me =P
I think i linked this picture when someone asked this before: comparasion
Well the picture on the wiki shows the basically the same thing, the second picture was from Quake 4, where the differerence is much more noticable.
The link on my first post, it explains the technology behind it, but the picture on the right side should be enough to understand what it does.
Thats all lies, the 'bump' setting actually makes all the ships look pregnant. I have my bump set to the highest so my ships move slower but they look sexy.
Uhh no... I was messing around with graphics options while zoomed in to the max (and then some) on a Kol. Bump creates little dark/light lines that make it look like the ship has lots of little trenches and platforms.
Those are probably what were intended to be scratches and dents in the hull of the ship you're looking at...
Seeing that on a ship that just rolled out of the factory makes me wonder if they were torture testing the hull during construction...
No, they are geometric lines. Very much intentional. They are supposed to be the shadows caused by individual extrusions in the ship's hull.
You still don't understand? Bump is used to add height detail to a flat surface. It changes how lighting falls on it to alter the surface slightly giving the illusion of depth. Now its called normal map and its far more advanced but its the same idea. The diffrent settings will most likely be loading in the normal map texture at diffrent resolutions for more or less detail/texture memory usage.
As others have demostrated, it lightens the edge that is facing the light and darkens the edge facing away. That crates highlight and shadow. Thats all that is nessasary for your eyes to belive its a raised surface.
I still prefer the prego idea though...
Here's what ToJKa linked to;
oh, absolutely 
How much of a performance gain do you get by turning off Bump Mapping?
It probably depends on the detail on it, it probably could mean the difference between dying and not dying due to lag...
But on the other hand, if you have a quite decent graphics card and lots of ram it probably doesn't really matter
From my experience playing Doom3 on an absolutely pititful computer, turning off Bump Mapping didn't increase performance significantly. Sins is of course different, but i'm sure lowering resolution or turning off AA has a better performance gain.
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