TGEA Deferred Rendering and Parallel Split Shadow Maps, pt 3

If you've been keeping an eye on my blogs you may remember that back in August I said something about a downloadable demo in the near future. I was pretty happy with performance on my current gaming rig (Q6600, Radeon 3870 graphics), there were just a few little bugs that needed ironing out and it was good to go. But before releasing anything I thought I'd do some benchmarking on my old gaming rig, which is an Athlon 3400 with NV7900 graphics. This had been sitting idle in a corner since I upgraded in my quest for more frames per second playing Stalker with full dynamic lighting. I treat myself to a KVM switch so I could run both systems without swapping cables around, transferred my work across, ran Stronghold, switched to deferred render mode and sat there stunned as it crawled along at a measly 12fps in 1024x768 resolution. Considering that Stalker was averaging around 30fps on this rig in outdoor scenes with lots of geometry and dynamic sun shadows, I was obviously doing something wrong. After going down some blind alleys eventually the penny dropped that really it was just that my shader code wasn't particularly well optimised but the shear rendering power of the Radeon had papered over the cracks. Anyway, with some help from the DirectX forum on GameDev.Net I've nearly but not quite doubled the performance on the NV7900 so far and I think I'm back on track now.

Anyway, no blog is complete without some eye candy so here are some screenshots taken with fraps on.

This first is the opening level from Stalker with the sun out and lots of directional shadows, full dynamic lighting turned on.



This is in TGEA 1.8.1 with deferred rendering on with the scene I put together for Konrad's awesome contest (if you're reading this and you haven't voted yet get over there and vote now, see what really cool things people are doing with all three generations of Torque tech). None of the buildings in this scene are LODed yet, which helps to stress test the renderer!




These next two are just the same but taken on my Athlon 3400/NV7900 system. I'm reasonably happy with these frame rates now, although stalker is doing is doing a lot more work in its scene, more geometry plus extra passes like edge detection and fake anti-aliasing. I'm no where near the Premier League but I think I'm out of the Vauxhall Conference now!





And finally these are of the TGEA T3D Demo, also taken on my Athlon 3400/NV7900 rig.




Anyway, I have to admit that getting from my first blog about deferred rendering in TGEA, www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/16909 way back when, to where this is now, has been a great learning experience, but its left me feeling a bit jaded. Torque 3D is starting to look very attractive as a Christmas treat to myself, especially after Brett's last blog about the in engine sketch tools, which looks totally awesome. I've come close to buying a license a couple of times. The thing that always stops me is if I upgrade now, I'll be too busy playing with my shiny new toy to finish this off, and I'm still determined to get a demo of this out there for other TGEA users to try for themselves. As I said before, “hopefully in the near future”.