Many Surfaces = Slowdown? Not me!
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Many Surfaces = Slowdown? Not me!
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| I just realized when working on my program that each time a face is selected, a brand new surface is created. (I did this back when I didn't know better). The odd part is, this doesn't seem to cause any slowdown even when I have over 100 faces selected (which means 100 individual surfaces). Is this because the surfaces aren't very complex? |
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| The amount of slowdown created by each surface almost surely depends on the 3D card. A faster 3D card will probably have less slowdown. Also, even my crappy old card could handle around 200 surfaces before I noticed a framerate drop. The slowdown per polygon is seperate from the slowdown per surface. |
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| hmm, I noticed a slow down on lower CPU systems, and the video card didn't seem to matter too much. P2 400 with a Geforce2 GTS would fall below 25FPS on my old FMC demo. Since I upgraded I put the Geforce2 in my old Athlon 1200 and it's about 300% faster and can handle a couple of 100 no problem. SO to me at least, in my tests it seems that the CPU is the more limiting factor with surafce count. Maybe I'm totaly wrong, but thats what I found in testing for most of my games I've worked on. |
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| Ive had thousands of surfaces before now... must be lucky ;) back when i first started and i made tracks out of 2000 cubes, i did get a rather steady framerate of 30fps.... this was a 600mhz celeron :/ But, yeah.... the processor is definitely the slowdown; The CPU power it takes to change states before rendering is quite a bit :) |
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| my old 600mhz could handle about 200-250 surfaces |
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| Hm... I hate limits no matter how high they are... I'll be hunting down a decent single-surface system I guess. |
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| Mr: Single surface systems limit you as well, they just have different limitations. :-) For example, with single surface systems, you have the problem of how many particles you can have in the mesh before modifying the mesh kills your framerate too much. And each mesh can only have one kind of particle, and you can't use the built in collision system, and more complex 3D particles are generally out of the question. More particles isn't always better! Higher quality 3D particles can look nicer. Take the dragon fire in Shrek for example. That was done with big spheres that had a glow effect applied, rather than thousands of tiny particles. |
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| I dont think he wants it for particles, its for selecting faces |
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| talking about surface count, is there some kind of surface count code anywhere that you can throw in much like a FPS counter. Might be useful to have some kind of debug pack or something for artists to more easily optimize their media. |
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