Monday Jet Setting

Signing In

A very short day today, consisting of emails, this blog, packing some bits and then a nice drive to Manchester. I have a meeting all day Tuesday which might provide some extra ammo in the world of Reloaded. More news on this if the mission is successful.

Signing Out

Continuation of performance work will resume Wednesday, as it has been almost unanimously agreed that PPP should remain top of the list for the time being. The mileage of the results you may have got with BETA 1.003 will vary wildly and I am not too surprised at the reports of slowdown in some cases and substantial increase in others.

I suspect the slow down comes from lower-end systems which are having to do more CPU work to calculate occlusion, and on the GPU side building vertex buffers dynamically might upset some graphics cards which do not expect this approach. Many games would build the entire world as an optimized static soup of polygons, and NEVER build them in real-time. It could be that once we have identified and singled out a group of machines that are reacting negatively to dynamic building of static batches, we can use an alternative technique that best fits those cards.  If anyone can demonstrate a substantial slow-down of a side by side test of 1.002 and 1.003, please send me your CPU and graphics card details so I can start to get an idea which kinds of systems react in this way.