Destruction of "high poly vs. low poly" argument

[Maelstrom]

2. What does this framerate picture look like if the units are all off-screen? The same, different? That's a very important consideration- if we're going to build mods that assume that shadows are on, then the performance drain really comes down to whether this is mainly when we can see 200 units... or with 200 units, period.

The last picture he posted was of no units on screen at all. It was getting 150 fps.

[Argh]

Oops, should've noted that

[Caydr]

That WAS with shadows off though. With shadows on, a similar scene gives me approximately 47 FPS.

[Argh]

IOW, we get 47 FPS with shadows whether or not the shadows are being drawn on the final page... that's not good...

[SinbadEV]

Destruction of "high poly vs. low poly" argument was the topic, now people can stop bashing high poly models and sinclair can get back to making UBER HIGH poly models for us without fear of it slowing down the game and Zaphod and the devs (I think AF promised he would do it) can make path finding stop sucking... thanks.

[Chrispin]

The online lobby shows everybody's speed wrong. I had a 2.6 GHz and it said 3.2. I'm about to upgrade my computer to just as good (or better compared to caydr) so that way I get a fast FPS and I wont lag up the servers as much. But that post was a long time ago. I didn't read up to date. But uh.... this is about making a new mod? Anyways I am completely oblivious to what's going on right now but I will just say that Caydr made those Absolute Annihilation models pretty good for the fact that he only had help from one person.

[SwiftSpear]

How the hell did this topic get bumped for that?

[LathanStanley]

just a little FYI!...

polygons take little to render....

large textures take LOTS to render...



you could have 1,000,000 tanks without textures, and droplike 50fps....

but if you have 4 tanks with 4096x4096 textures, yer gonna drop like 100fps....

[Zenka]

Hmm, on fully zoomed out and all setting on max, my fps is 15.
When I place 1000 of my core silencer remakes (3500 tris and uncompressed 2 mb of texture (it got 2)) the framerate drops to 5.
Well not that anyone would be likely to build that many nukes.

Selfdestruction did made a hell of a land destruction. you could build a huge armada on small divide.

[SwiftSpear]

just a little FYI!...

polygons take little to render....

large textures take LOTS to render...



you could have 1,000,000 tanks without textures, and droplike 50fps....

but if you have 4 tanks with 4096x4096 textures, yer gonna drop like 100fps....

That depends if they all use the same texture or if you're talking about 4 individual tank models with thier own textures. Also, you can get ALOT of textures on screen if you have a PCIe generation card or massive ammounts of video memory.

[GrOuNd_ZeRo]

Caydr, rest assured, your models look better than mine right now...

I can't UV-map worth shit (mainly because LithUnwrap is such a shoddy tool).

[Argh]

Don't use LithUnwrap... use UVMapper Classic... much better... although LithUnwrap has a few useful features...

[FizWizz]

Don't use LithUnwrap... use UVMapper Classic... much better... although LithUnwrap has a few useful features...

use 'em both. The Weld feature in Lith is cool, btw

[SinbadEV]

Just Wondering...

My Chess Pieces currently all share the same 128x128 texture (solid color so it didn't matter) is this texture loaded into memory just one time total, onece for each s3o that uses it or once for each instance of each unit.

[Argh]

Your texture will get loaded once. Each file, apparantly gets loaded once.

[aGorm]

BTW ... if it realy is solid colour... you could just use a 2x2 pixel texture. would save file size space.

aGorm

[Caydr]

Suppose you've got 3 trillion textures, right? All in a mod. K? So you've got these textures. And they're... colourful, right? So, these textures are in a mod, and they're just sitting there. And there in this mod, and this guy loads the mod in question. So there's all these textures, right?

Now, are they all loaded thereby exploding the universe, during startup? Or are they loaded as they are needed by the game?

Then suppose, you've got like 200 units, right? But they're not all onscreen. 20 here, 30 there, 4 on the floor, 2 in the bush, 1 in the hand, and you get the picture. They're not all onscreen. So are all their textures loaded into memory? Or just as they come onscreen?

Now, by some miracle, the universe has not exploded, but you've got all these units onscreen. They're all unique units. No duplicates. My eyes hurt. 10 of these units get blown up by a Russian spy. Are their textures removed from memory?

[Min3mat]

good questions, if somewhat sarcastically phrased

[Argh]

Now, are they all loaded thereby exploding the universe, during startup? Or are they loaded as they are needed by the game?

They're loaded "as they are needed by the game". Which, actually, sucks a lot MORE than if they were loaded at startup, which is what I've asked for. There's a quite-noticable delay as each unit is loaded, so why not get all the delays over with at startup?

So are all their textures loaded into memory? Or just as they come onscreen?

So far as I can ascertain, they are loaded into video memory, and stay there. I see no evidence that they are being swapped into/out of RAM to VRAM, but I'd like to hear from Zaphod.

Now, by some miracle, the universe has not exploded, but you've got all these units onscreen. They're all unique units. No duplicates. My eyes hurt. 10 of these units get blown up by a Russian spy. Are their textures removed from memory?

No. They're definately stored in RAM, probably in VRAM. So long as the game is active. Which means, among other things, that when we have huge mods with lots of high-resolution textures, we may have problems with users who have low-end video cards. Unless the Spring folks fix DDS support (I should note that while 0.72b fixed several things, DDS support is still borked, at least on my 6600GT, which I'm replacing soon) we're going to continue to have these problems, because only with DDS do we have the possibility of maybe using forced-down mipmap levels (supposing, of course that the modders use proper mipmaps) to make minimal texture-usage possible for players.

Basically... what we have now is, in my opinion, the worst of all possible solutions. The best (again, in my opinion) is to load all mod content into RAM, load the map into RAM, and then do fast transfer between RAM and VRAM whenever an object is going to be drawn. RAM is a lot less precious than VRAM, at least for most people who don't have giant DDR3 video cards from Hell (like the one I'm putting in Da Box tonight, hehe), so this would result in good speed and high performance, with the obvious cost of having to decompress the mod and load it into RAM at startup. If mods were then unpacked (i.e., if we RAR'd them, but had them packed at zero compression in .SDZ) then they'd load fairly quickly (moving 100MB from HD to RAM is not terribly painful these days) and then play really efficiently. People with really, really, REALLY low RAM (like, anybody under 256MB, these days) would have to use Virtual Memory, for really big mods... but... meh... I don't feel a lot of sympathy for them.

[SpikedHelmet]

Hi,


Can you guys stop arguing about crap, and come texture my Axis & Allies model so they don't look like absolute shit?