It's strange that alphachannel makes a difference at all, cause ALL models are rendered with AlphaTest enabled what breaks EarlyZ afaik for all GPUs (stupid design failure in their hw imo). And so it will always call the fragment shader even for hidden triangles.

I just fired up Spring 0.77b2. Higher fps, yes, but it also does not seem to support these alpha masked features, nothing is being rendered.

Oh, you! My favorite spring troll! <3

any progress?

I believe the conclusion was that this map has trees with thousands of triangles, and that this in conjunction with alpha testing gives a performance hit.

In Altored Divide Remake V3, if you disable alpha testing and zoom in close to one of these groups of trees (about 50 trees each) the FPS drops to ~175.

As a comparison, if you spawn 50 armveil in BAR, that contain approximately the same number of triangles, and zoom in close the FPS is also ~175.

So case closed until someone shows that an older Spring version etc. will render it faster. Problem is, like I said, that old Spring versions don't even support alpha masked features.

No.

Sorry, that is dismissing it out of hand using a biased test case

Not sure how this is biased. If you spawn 500 of these trees from Altored V3 and disable alpha testing, the FPS is 90-100. Same FPS as with 500 armveil.

With alpha testing, the FPS drops to 20-30. So alpha masked stuff is ~3 times as expensive to render. This is consistent with results experienced by some other game devs:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/625460-ren ... any-trees/

you are treating altoredv3 as a fair gauge of feature poly count.