TSE optimizations
by Brian Ramage · 06/07/2006 (12:43 am) · 41 comments
Hey everyone, just wanted to give a little bit of an update on the optimizations I've been working on for TSE. The batching system is working out very well as you can see in the fps of the screenshots I've posted. That's 10 space orcs in one shot running around 140 fps on a 3.4ghz P4 with an x800.
The batching essentially will group up draw calls into one manager, stuffing them into bins like mesh, interior, translucent, glow, etc. Each bin is then sorted by Material, and then at draw time, it will loop through each Material and send the appropriate draw and shader data to the card. It greatly reduces the number of render calls to the GPU and speeds things up quite a bit.
Since you can control the order that the bins are drawn and you can add your own fairly easily, a lot of the sorting issues in TSE should be eliminated, and also customized to the needs of your game.
While working on the new batching system I also found and resolved more issues related to the skinning system in TSE. Dynamic vertex buffers have now been fully implemented (as opposed to the existing 'volatile' vertex buffers), so transferring vertex data up has been further optimized.
In this lower shot, you can see the new "Warning" material that I've created to let the user know that there is an unmapped material in the scene. This should make it easier to detect than the previous "drop to fixed function with no lighting" system. It works for most of the major geometry - interiors and meshes.
This update should go live pretty soon, I'm just cleaning up some minor remaining issues and waiting for some Atlas changes to be complete before it's released. I'm also hoping to kill some bugs over the next few days that the community has brought to my attention.
Almost forgot to mention - the batching has been tested on Geforce cards and seems to have substantially increased performance. This scene runs about 120fps on Matt Fairfax's laptop with a Geforce 6800 in it. I put a 6600 in my machine and it runs about 40ps - not spectacular, but I'm not sure even one Orc ran at that speed previously.
I also want to mention the great work Joe Maruschak did on optimizing the space orc and his gun to use just two materials. This reduced the number of separate meshes in the orc from 27 down to 16 and almost doubled the performance when combined with the batching. Thanks Joe!
The batching essentially will group up draw calls into one manager, stuffing them into bins like mesh, interior, translucent, glow, etc. Each bin is then sorted by Material, and then at draw time, it will loop through each Material and send the appropriate draw and shader data to the card. It greatly reduces the number of render calls to the GPU and speeds things up quite a bit.
Since you can control the order that the bins are drawn and you can add your own fairly easily, a lot of the sorting issues in TSE should be eliminated, and also customized to the needs of your game.
While working on the new batching system I also found and resolved more issues related to the skinning system in TSE. Dynamic vertex buffers have now been fully implemented (as opposed to the existing 'volatile' vertex buffers), so transferring vertex data up has been further optimized.
In this lower shot, you can see the new "Warning" material that I've created to let the user know that there is an unmapped material in the scene. This should make it easier to detect than the previous "drop to fixed function with no lighting" system. It works for most of the major geometry - interiors and meshes.
This update should go live pretty soon, I'm just cleaning up some minor remaining issues and waiting for some Atlas changes to be complete before it's released. I'm also hoping to kill some bugs over the next few days that the community has brought to my attention.
Almost forgot to mention - the batching has been tested on Geforce cards and seems to have substantially increased performance. This scene runs about 120fps on Matt Fairfax's laptop with a Geforce 6800 in it. I put a 6600 in my machine and it runs about 40ps - not spectacular, but I'm not sure even one Orc ran at that speed previously.
I also want to mention the great work Joe Maruschak did on optimizing the space orc and his gun to use just two materials. This reduced the number of separate meshes in the orc from 27 down to 16 and almost doubled the performance when combined with the batching. Thanks Joe!
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