Why video games are made of tiny triangles

Inside your favorite games — Red Dead Redemption 2, Fortnite, PUBG, Rocket League — you’ll find millions of tiny triangles.



Games today are meticulously detailed. They’re mysterious and heartwarming, and colorful and stylized. And that makes them a technical challenge. Though computing power has skyrocketed, gamemakers keep competing to add more detail to their games, pushing the limits of what even the newest technology can compute. Game technology needs to constantly keep up with gamemakers’ creative ambitions.

Triangles are a key part of how these gorgeous, detailed games appear on your screen — the hidden heroes we should all thank as we play. This simple shape helps keep the number of computations needed for each detail as low as possible, allowing the player's computer to process these elaborate games.

Watch the video above to find out how triangles make room for creators to build the beautiful games that exist today.

[arvaborelius]

*CPU'S ARE JUST ROCKS WE TRICKED INTO THINKING*

[katycrawford]

vox: answering questions you never knew you had

[LordofBroccoli]

0:38 "But you never see them."

Well someone hasn't played Fallout 76...

[Germania]

Who knew Keira Knightley knows a lot about games?

[goat]

This should be popular now after the UE5 reveal.

[evaristegalois]

Here’s why video games are made from tiny triangles:

Lvl 1 : Squares
Lvl 100 : Triangles

*_That’s how shapes work_*

[kunwoododd]

But this is only half the story. During the development process, everything in the video game is usually made of rectangles. However, at the end of the development, all the rectangles are converted to triangles. This is because it's much easier for game developers to work with rectangles, but it's easier for GPUs to work with triangles.

[przemysawgumienny]

And that's why NVIDIAs HQ is shaped like a triangle.

[ayh]

Minecraft: No, I don't think I will

[happykiller]

Should also be mentioned that they make the models using squares then subdivide it into triangles. It's just way easier to thing spatially when dealing with squares and when you're all set you can just press a button to turn it into triangles.

[usethefooorce]

3:01 the singular of "vertices" is "vertex"

[subashgowtham]

**slaps ps5** This boy can fit in so many triangles!

[suleimanmustafa]

How far into a new year is it acceptable to greet "Happy New Year!"?

[nalaprodd]

vox: put thousands of these or maybe even millions
me: oh shoot then the ps5 tech demo is more impressive

[Shawn.Shooter]

I just watched a video of the Unreal Engine 5 for PS5 and came here to see why video games are made of tiny triangles.

[pil]

i used to study games design but switched over to animation with a focus on 3d, the hardest part was switching over from triangles to my teachers telling me everything's gotta be quads.
love that you guys cover these kinda topics!

[gabrielusgabby]

the 3 vs 4 dots thing just blew my mind

[kaktotak]

"But you never see them"
This girl is young.

[osga]

Curiously enough the Sega Saturn rendered everything in rectangles instead of triangles. This proved to be an issue(among many others) when porting games to the console because every other game was rendered using triangles. Most devs would just set the side of a rectangle to 0, effectively making it a triangle, however this was less than ideal.

[siva]

Why did the console gamer crossed the road ?





To render the other end of the street