Speed increase Dx7 and Modern videocards
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/Speed increase Dx7 and Modern videocards
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| I have not programmed much in blitz 3d over the last years. Meanwhile the video cards have become better. Has Blitz3d become more powerfull with the new cards/cpu's and wil this keep increasing? Is dx7 a problem here? Can you put more tris in the screen then say 10 years ago and is this not limited with dx7? I heared once that the tris increase is tens of percents a year. Is b3d still good/better today? |
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| There is a limit of vertices and triangles per surface (personally i have seen MAVs even on recent graphics cards of low end laptops) so i put maximum 32 000 vertices per surface and 32 000 triangles per surface. But you can have several surfaces in a mesh so this is not really a problem. Another issue is that the first time you try to run an executable made with Blitz3d, Windows will prompt to install directplay, but the installation is guided and easy and only takes a few minutes, but the computer needs to be connected to the internet. Apart from that, it seems to work well even on recent computers, do a search on the forum there are several posts about (minor) problems with Windows 8 and Windows 10, with more details. |
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| Blitz3D is faster today than it's ever been. The hardware is getting better and this accounts for most of it (DX7 is also generally more efficient now that it's emulated than it was when it was the actual graphics API). However, Blitz3D's style of rendering doesn't take advantage of modern hardware very well, so it sees much smaller improvements than other, more modern, engines will. Blitz3D is heavily limited by trying to do things on the CPU in sequence and feed them to the GPU one at a time, where a modern renderer does everything on the GPU in parallel and keeps it there, so while a modern CPU might be able to do sequential operations 10-20x faster than when Blitz3D was new, it doesn't get to take advantage of the ~100000x-boost in overall power machines have seen. Blitz3D's design is inefficient, but it's also the only way it could do things at the time when it was developed. It still works out as a positive, but a very small one because there really isn't much work going into making sequential operation much faster any more - that entire model of computing is a dead end. |
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| Technically it is possible to make a Blitz3D have full access to new video cards ? I dream that one day may develop something. perhaps creating an application that runs in parallel to blitz , you have access to new technologies but it is commanded from the dear old blitz . I think blitz is only one step behind modern tools. it is only a small step to find ways to overcome it. with creativity and blitz I think you can do all kinds of games, small and big games. I do not know anything about how they could develop a blitz that allows access to modern graphics, but with great pleasure would help do sorry my english :) |
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| I do not know anything about how they could develop a blitz that allows access to modern graphics, but with great pleasure would help do If blitz3d gets upgraded to at least DX9, it should now allow modern graphics like shader programming and GPU workload. Take for example Torque3D uses mainly DX9 because their DX11 is still experimental but you can check out some great visuals like Life is Fuedal.  Not that it is not possible replicating that on B3d, some effects like texture shadows and full GPU usage is really an advantage. |
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