Should this be in development? I've been posting there a lot lately about little observations and technical questions, but maybe I should reserve it for really important stuff. Please move if you think it's appropriate.
First, I think shadow rendering for grass is off now. That's great. Performance seems to be better, but it might be just me going crazy since I have this new video card and everything seems superfast.
Next, there's this strange performance thing I found. Using HOME and END keys, I can adjust the view radius on the map, how far out it should render at maximum quality and gradually be less and less detailed.
I think its default setting is 100 or so.
Anyway, when I increase this value to eliminate "popping" of distant mountains as I zoom on them (it's very slight as it is, but if I've got the FPS to spare, why not), I find that my FPS drops very suddenly at a certain point and I'm wondering if there's some kind of bug. Maybe it doesn't really matter anymore since we're using this SM3 renderer instead in the near future, but if any code is carried over, it might be worth looking at... I'm a dunce, sue me. I don't understand the technical stuff, I just tells it like I sees it....
So here's my findings. On left side is view radius, on right side is my FPS. My FPS is capped at 75 because I love VSync.
100 - 75
118 - 75
128 - 58
132 - 45
138 - 40
250 - 38
As you can see, Between 118 and 128 there is a loss of performance of almost 20 FPS. Between 118 and 138, there is a loss of 35. Yet between 118 and 250, the loss is hardly any higher, at only 37.
If it was some issue of exponential division making the calculations exponentially more difficult and driving performance down sharply beyond a certain point, I could of course understand that. But instead there's just this small range in which there's a huge difference, and everywhere else it's mostly constant, or at least predictable. Any ideas?
.73 : two observations
Moderator: Moderators
It's very well possible that somewhere between 138 and 250 (closer to 138) is a value where the entire map is already rendered in highest detail. Hence increasing the value further wouldn't cause a further increase in detail & decrease in FPS.
And the default (in spring, don't know about settings.exe), is 40.
And the default (in spring, don't know about settings.exe), is 40.
