optimizing framerate

[patchx]

what causes lousy framerates beside architectural complexetiness..ness

 

i know all about area portals and hint brushes already so if anyone has some answers that dont include those 2 subjects i would very very gratefull

 

would coloured strobe lights a.k.a disco madness cause it?

 

-patch

[UniKorn]

When you can see a lot of complex shaders from a certain area you will get slowdowns as well. With complex I mean stuff like glass, beams, animated shaders, ... Saying shaders would be wrong since every texture, even if it isn't a shader in a shaderlist is considered a shader.

[patchx]

ahhhhhhhhh....

 

so glass will slow it down huh?

 

kewl

ill try getting rid of that

 

 

cheers

 

-patch

[RichDiesal]

Easiest way to look at it is basically, anything where JK2 needs to draw transparencies will cause a frame drop.

 

(i.e. simple light-emitting shaders won't cause much video lag since the lighting information is already compiled. Note, however, that it still causes a little bit. )

[UniKorn]

Transparency, reflections and animated shaders.

[Grudge]

Overdraw is a big fps-dropper. That's when the engine is forced to draw textured surfaces that you can't see in the game. With optimized construction with caulked surfaces and correct splitting of brushes allows you to build very complex architecture without affecting the framerate very much. You can actually have rather high r-speeds (many polygons drawn), and still have good fps if you manage to avoid overdraw.

 

When it comes to shaders, it is a good thing to avoid having too many shaders requiring two (extra) rendering passes or more. You can see that in the shader script. Just one blendFunc effect(for example) is quite ok, but with two or three, it really starts to take a toll on the fps (if you're using the shader too much).

 

Raven seems to like to really go crazy on their shaders, so many of them has got three or even four blendFunc's.

 

// Grudge

[patchx]

so would it bit better to split a large brush into smaller brushes so that you could caulk the sections of the large brush that arent seen?

 

-patch

[Drakewl]

jep its exactly what you are talking about, at least how i remember other threads about it

 

increasing the tris, with other words splitting up a brush to caulk different parts that cant be seen, won't impact the performance as much as the so called overdraw, where texturefaces are drawn, that cant be seen

[patchx]

back to thing about animated shaders, will heaps of sky effect framerate? especially the starry sort of space sky?

 

-patch

[patchx]

...also

 

what is the absolute lowest that your fps should get to?

 

and what is the average you should expect?

 

-patch

[Drakewl]

imho the lowest acceptable for me is about 25 fps but for this count i wish to see some real eye candy

 

btw i have a pIII 866 with geforce 2 ultra and 386mb sdram

 

 

my average fps standard is maybe somewhat low for others (have seen people that like to have about 70 frames average), but im happy with about 35 frames