UV mapping doesn't work without duplicating vertices, but duplicating will reduce performance, right? Is there another solution?

Question

Situation: I've been trying to gradually get a lower and lower level of understanding of how games work, and lately I've been following Rastertek's DirectX 11 tutorials. Of course, I started branching off on my own and experimenting, like a good little programmer.

I noticed that the tutorial had a set of 3 vertices for each triangle, even if that meant duplicating vertices that were there anyway. So a cube would have 12 triangles * 3 vertices/triangle = 36 vertices, when it only needed 8. This seems like it could reduce performance by quite a bit in more complicated models.

However, when I tried setting the indices to reuse vertices, I ran into problems because the normal and UV coords are assigned to each vertex. I averaged the normal vectors, which resulted in smoothing the lighting where it probably shouldn't have been smooth, and UV coords...well...right now they overwrite each other as they're importing, which results in crazy things, like so: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Rr6aB.jpg

My thoughts: Right now, I see one reasonable solution. When UV mapping in Blender, I had to create "seams", which the model was unwrapped around and blah blah, I'm sure you know what that is. Anyway, I could duplicate the vertices on these seams only, which would solve both performance and texturing quite nicely.

This wouldn't require much change in the code I currently have, but Blender's exporting algorithms don't seem to cooperate with this approach. At least not with the .obj format. Getting this approach to work correctly looks entirely possible, but also annoyingly difficult.

Finally, the question: So now I'm here, typing to you people. Am I on the right track? Or is there an entirely different approach I haven't thought of yet? What is the normal way of doing this?

Of course the other question is, will duplicating vertices like that really have a significant impact on performance? My very premise could be mistaken.

Answer 1

Performance shouldn't be affected at all, it'll just take up a small amount of extra memory. The hardware draws triangles independently, the only difference between the two is that the one without duplicates will just be reading multiple times from the same memory address while the one with duplicates will read from separate memory addresses.

While it may seem like a waste, it's necessary because those vertices are unique. There's more in a vertex than just the position. Two vertices with the same position but different texture coordinates/normals are not the same vertex.