Hardware T&L

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QuestOfDreams
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Post by QuestOfDreams » Thu Aug 11, 2005 1:13 am

To be honest you won't see much difference in the current state of the driver... In the last screen I posted the new driver only rendered actors, here you can see that it now also renders the whole world with hardware TnL...
framerates seem to be very good compared to the current driver but I can't say more until I have the lightmaps rendering...

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Post by MakerOfGames » Sun Aug 14, 2005 4:37 am

Ok, still a little lost here. What about modern mother boards with integrated graphics? How will T&L affect them? Not at all? And most pcs now a days will have better than a gforce 1. My TNT 2 can render up to 8 million polys per second. And i read on the net that Geforce 1s can render about 14 million polys per second. Now at a silky smooth 60 frames per second I could get 133,000 polygons on screen at a time. But what I hear is that Beyond Virtual is just now making it possible to render 200,000 + polys on screen. So what will be the limit of polys if you have this type of capibilities with your graphics card?
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Theoretical versus Realistic / Real-World conditions

Post by gekido » Sun Aug 14, 2005 7:01 am

The numbers that you are quoting are what the Hardware manufacturer claims under ideal conditions - ie you are rendering poly's ONLY and nothing else.

This is something that people are trying to spout as 'realistic' numbers when talking about video card performance - when these numbers are often faked and/or under completely unrealistic conditions.

For example, there have been numerous reported cases of driver manufacturers blatantly adding 'cheats' into their drivers that detect when test applications such as 3d mark etc are being run on their hardware, so that the video card 'seems' to perform better than it actually does.

Same thing with the Demos that Nvidia, ATI etc release using their hardware - they claim that millions of poly's are being rendered in realtime etc - but this is ALL their applications are doing.

Once you add the 'game' layers to your renderer, such as Physics, Audio, Scripting and other components - you will have considerably less polygon throughput from your video card, even with the most-optimized game engines in the world such as Doom3 etc.

Now, where features such as T&L, dedicated 3d hardware and so on come into play is that they allow developers to offload some (not all) of the work that goes into processing all of these poly's from the main CPU (as was the case in pre-hardware T&L renderers such as RF's) to the Video processor itself.

T&L stands for 'Transformation and Lighting' meaning that instead of transforming (rotating, scaling etc) those poly's on the main CPU, you can offload these computations onto the video card itself for processing.

Simply adding T&L support to RF should theoretically increase the performance of the renderer significantly - as it is currently your main processor speed has a LOT more affect on your framerate than the quality of your video card, simply because the processor is where all of this work is happening, and the video card is simply drawing polygons.

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Post by Guest » Sun Aug 14, 2005 1:12 pm

Man Im thouroughly excited. :D Hey after adding the dx9 renderer, wont it be possible to use dds for textures, and to add support for HLSL?

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Post by MakerOfGames » Sun Aug 14, 2005 8:38 pm

Ok, thanks for that explination! I didnt know much at all about videocards and how games use the gpu and cpu.

So, lets say that you have a graphics card/integrated graphics that can "display" 3,000,000 polygons per second. Would it be reasonable to say with physics, audio and player scripting that you could display 40,000 polygons on screen at 30 frames per second(the total polygons per second would be 1,200,000)?

I am 3d modeling everyting for my game now, and dont want my player charactors hogging all the polys and leaving the rest of the level very empty and boring. Also, my game is a first person shooter and dont want to suffer from lag. So does my guess hold any truth?



Keep up the great work advancing RF :D
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Post by Jay_Guest » Sun Aug 14, 2005 8:45 pm

With DirecX9, it will be possible to add support for HLSL, because HLSL is a part of DirectX9. But don't think that just having DirectX9 implemented, you will be able to use the feature immediatly, because Shaders have to be implemented somehow too. But maybe in the near future...
I don't know enough of dds to say if it's somehow related to DirectX, so i cannot say much about that.

[Edit QuestOfDreams: cleaned up Jays guest posts]

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Post by Jay » Sun Aug 14, 2005 8:57 pm

MakerOfGames wrote: So, lets say that you have a graphics card/integrated graphics that can "display" 3,000,000 polygons per second. Would it be reasonable to say with physics, audio and player scripting that you could display 40,000 polygons on screen at 30 frames per second(the total polygons per second would be 1,200,000)?
I think you have to try out...depends on the game, the number of scripts used at one time and so on.


Oh and yes, a very good job you're doing, Quest! I have waited a long time for somebody doing it, because i cannot program very well myself... :D
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Post by MakerOfGames » Mon Aug 15, 2005 3:31 am

Ok, guess old trial and error will have to solve my question then. Thanks for the help and info everyone.
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Post by Gamespider » Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:04 pm

The guest was me. Forgot to log on. Anyway, when is this likely to be out? will the renderer support other cheesy dx9 effects such as volumetric lighting?

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Post by scott » Sun Aug 28, 2005 5:36 pm

13 days later, unlucky for some...... (after last post)

hows it going, got any further yet or having problems again with the code?
*GD*

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trial and error is the way of the game developer ;}

Post by gekido » Tue Aug 30, 2005 8:22 am

trial and error is basically what game development is all about - you try one thing and see if it works - not only 'works' as in technically, but works according to your target systems specs AND gets the proper framerate while doing so.

it really depends on alot of factors, but these seem to be the two big ones:
- how many active pawns you want in a scene is a big one
- how many dynamic lights you want in the scene

otherwise it's all a matter of balance - what we do (even with beyond virtual) is keep adding density to a scene until it barfs and then determine 'why' it is barfing - is it visual detail, is it collision / physics detail, is it the scripting processor, etc...

with BV it tends to be collision calculations that take the heaviest hit on the framerate, second to the number of large textures in a scene. video cards, even with the fast gpu's on today's systems have a problem swapping large textures in and out of memory quickly, so you end up with framerate hits even if you can theoretically 'draw' as many poly's as are required on the screen.

any engine is the same - just need to determine what the bottleneck is, and work backwards until you get performance back.

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Post by QuestOfDreams » Thu Sep 01, 2005 4:31 pm

Anyway, when is this likely to be out? will the renderer support other cheesy dx9 effects such as volumetric lighting?
hows it going, got any further yet or having problems again with the code?
I'm currently pretty busy with a project for university (mini opengl engine with network support) so there's no progress right now.
I found a pretty interesting article about packing small lightmaps into a larger one so this shouldn't be any problem to implement
After that is done I'll probably have to change a bit of the level rendering queue to make it use the new driver features more efficiently. Once this is done all the special effects like bumpmapping, stencil shadows etc will need some rewriting... blablabla... well I guess what I want to say is that it will just take some time untill it's ready for use

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scott
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Post by scott » Mon Sep 05, 2005 11:49 pm

:( i cant belive it, i have a modern computer, with an intel grapchics card with 64mb memory intergrated with my mother board and ive just had alook at intels driver for it to get the lates one and found out my graphics card dosnt support hardware T&L, so i think this is a lost cors for me!
but hey keep the good work up, itl shorly help some1 else
*GD*

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Post by AndyCR » Tue Sep 06, 2005 2:40 am

i have the same video in my laptop, and no, it dosent support hardware t&l, and it honestly isnt a modern card, and is really... err, well junk. it's good for being integrated graphics though, i think.

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Post by GD1 » Tue Sep 06, 2005 8:39 pm

The newer integrated chips support TnL, but anything more than 4-6 months old doesn't. I just got a new computer with an integrated ATI Xpress 200m, which i thought was gonna be pretty crappy, but it actually is BETTER than my GeforceFX 5200. Full TnL and shaders. It has some issues with OpenGL, but i'm hoping the next wave of catalyst drivers will fix it.
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