High antialiasing and 1bit transparent models cause gpu load

[Beherith]

Is this normal for an nvidia card? (8800gt)
An AA setting of 4 already causes this noticable drop.
Can be tested on any map with a high number of nice trees (like blindside-v2) http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-maps/blindsidev2

The fps can drop to 25% of the map only fps with just a handful of trees zoomed in close.

This may be arghish: but could pre-sorting the triangles in the s3o in Y order be of any help?

[jK]

From what engine output is your opinion formed?

I encountered a massive FPS drop on "Seths Ravine V2", too. But even after 2h deepest profiling (full range of toolsets) I couldn't find a single cause. So I assume it is related to the massive feature count itself (iirc >1000 on Seths Ravine). And closed this for me with "mapper should have merged multiple trees/foliages into a single model" solution (engine optimizations for this are non-trivial and need a lot work I don't want spend without being 100% sure it would solve the issue).

@Blindside2 IIRC the used tree models are highly unoptimized, too. Modelers should know these 2 things:
1. http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=News&ID=266
2. http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=News&ID=228

[Beherith]

Damn nice articles, I'll try to implement them on the pine tree models. I always thought 'optimized' meant low poly count :D

[Beherith]

I tried both the greedy triangulation, and the alpha optimization (where I replaced the triangles with a 7 vertex flat shape, that was approximately 50% smaller than the wasteful triangle shape.

The map used was a blank 2x2 test map, with 1000 trees each 32 elmos apart.

29-30 fps on all of them. The interesting thing is that its 29 fps no matter how much I zoomed into it. If I was at map edge, then fps was proportional to the percentage of screen covered by map.

I have an 8800 gt.

After disabling shadows (i ran at 4096 cause i like it pretty) the fps rockets to 100, but is still independent of optimization.

Anti aliasing was set to 0.

Trees are spawned at start in gadgets/treeplacer.lua; replace uad0_aleppo_10 with uad0_aleppo_10_7seg and uad0_aleppo_10_7seg_greedy to test the optimizations.