Anonymous: that’s what they get for hacking the prefs! 🙂 The shadow feature is not ready to be used yet, that’s why it’s not posted. The performance you might see hacking that switch isn’t even remotely predictive of how the feature will work – anything could happen because the code is just in an experimental stage.

Anonymous: those posted FPS with water at various levels is exactly what I would expect.

Kaminari: this blog isn’t a great forum for perf troubleshooting. Anonymous was able to see my results (low cost for low-geometry reflections) with some rendering settings. Please email me to follow up –
I would have expected the X1900 series to do what my X1600 does but faster. If it does not, perhaps we can isolate why. I consider a comparison to the X1600 useful but not the comparison to a first-person
shooter game…that kind of rendering engine is totally different from what a flight-sim does. It’s Apples to Oranges.

Josh: please email me – you should not be seeing this kind of fps loss and I would like to investigate what your card is doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw9r_VCbqpE

Though probably not an easy thing to accomplish I concede?

Keep on trying!

Let’s see

AA off, rendering settings turned up, getting about 32 FPS at LOWI08

Turn shaders on, no Fog, Water None: 30-31 FPS

Low: 29 FPS
Default: 24 FPS
Advanced: 20 Fps (the plane starts to stutter while sitting parked on the runway)

thanks for your explanations!

With all due respect Ben, I find this hardly believable. On my Radeon X1950 Pro, activating the lowest water detail makes my system loose as much as 25% fps! A scene running at 40 fps with standard water will easily drop down below 30 fps at the lowest pixel shader setting. From then, enabling any level of reflection will lock down the sim to 19 fps!

By comparison (if such a comparison can be made), Crysis at high detail runs at a steady 25 fps in HDR (shader 3) on my rig. I can fairly assume that something doesn’t work quite right in XP9. Such a simple water shading can’t be that taxing on my card.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v452/SUBS17/2007-02-03_131222.jpg

3D-lighting in external model too (not only 3D cockpit) for several light sources (rotating beacon, or missiles/flares, for example). It’s a very cool effect and give some extra effect to night flying.

Regards!!

but another approach is just to put a bright spot (the sun) onto the sphere map (without the ground or sky). this gives some good reflections of the sun on the plane. it is better to use normal maps on this approach because this will give more precise reflections, than just with specular light.

System:
Beta 6
Win XP
Opteron 165 (dual core 2+ghz)
2 Gig PC3200 RAM
NVidia 6800GT, 256meg

Settings:
Resolution: 1680 x 1050
AA: OFF
Water on, reflections none.
Volumetric fog off.

I’ve got trees and objects cranked up a fair bit and run at a smooth 30 fps. If I enable the water pixel shaders I drop down to 19. I wonder if this is an NVidia related problem. I’m pretty sure the hit was much smaller with an earlier beta but I can’t say for certain.

If there’s any sort of profiling you’d like me to run I can give it a shot when I get home (I’m a programmer so know a bit about this stuff).

I would like to see shadows in more places – we already have some code started for that but it’s not ready for prime-time yet. Shadows are murderously hard to get right. 🙁

Regarding the illumination on the airplane body, is this a light whose focus/halo moves over time, or is it just the intensity that is changing?

Now…I would like to hear what your system does when you set yours the way I did…in particular, I want to identify how much the “baseline” cost of reflective water (ignoring the cost of building the complex reflection texture) varies from machine to machine.

First, note that the lowest setting of reflective water is, in my mind, “none”, NOT “low”, or whatever Austin called it. The reason is this: when shaders are on, you ALWAYS get reflective water – it just may be that the reflection texture has only the sky dome in it. My speculation was (having seen only a 4% fps hit) that this was a tiny price to pay for much more accurate sky-water color matching.

So the 8% number, not the 17% number, is the one I am comparing! If I go to the next level, I am sure the cost will go up — the sim has to render more into the reflection texture. (The sky gets put in when you go to that next level.)

Please set the following settings:
1. No anti-aliasing.
2. 1024×768 res.
3. Then crank up the 3-d objects enough to have about 30 fps without pixel shaders.

Under those conditions, what is the fps loss to turn pixel shaders on (with the reflective water on “none” so you have only sky reflections, or whatever Austin called the very first menu pick, and volumetric fog OFF)?

That object loading matters too…I’ll explain why in another blog post.