Hybrid Rendering

vi-wer · Post by **vi-wer** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 12:16 am

After some researches on the web I found a way to do hybrid rendering with Irrlicht. ( Want to know what that is? It's simply 2D/3D compositing. )
I would like to use it in some games, but before I would like to know if it's suitable for games or not. Therefore I made a small demo you can download it from here.
What I'd like to know is on what hardware it works ( might not work on ATI cards with old drivers) and how many FPS can be reached. I get 200fps on my GF6600GT (>900 without this rendering technic).
A short description:
It's a simple scene where you can move a character. Controls are W,A,D to walk and ESC to exit.

If you got some time try it out and tell me how it works.

Here some screenshot.

[UPDATE]Here's the new version. <=Try this one instead of the one above.[/UPDATE]

[UPDATE2]
Version 3 screens.
Version 3 Demo.

JP · Post by JP » Mon Oct 29, 2007 9:23 am

328fps with shadows on (they're messed up though), 913fps without! I'm afraid i don't know what graphics card this PC has as it's my work one and is a little locked down so i can't look at the device manager.

Is the sydney model is meant to be black with see-thru holes in, 2D and slightly... strange looking?

sio2 · Post by **sio2** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:03 am

Interesting. Years ago a lot of games were rendered like this, with high quality pre-rendered backgrounds, a depth buffer of some kind, and compositing 3D "into" the scene.

I get 535fps with shadows and 1280fps without on an 8800. If I walk Sydney into the doorway I get as high as 780fps (shadows on).

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:57 am

Crashes every time with an 0x00000000 access violation, in fullscreen and windowed mode, with shadows and debug whatsits on or off, and regardless of how many times I re-run it.

Radeon Mobility 9000 (32MB VRAM), DirectX 9.0c.

vi-wer · Post by **vi-wer** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:48 pm

I've uploaded a screenshot, the link is in my first post or click here.

I'm afraid i don't know what graphics card this PC has

This should be mentioned in the console on startup.

Crashes every time with an 0x00000000 access violation,

That's what I expected. You've got an ATI card. On some other forums I've read that the OpenGL features I'm using in this demo are not supported by older ATI cards and their drivers. Do you have the latest ATI Catalyst driver installed? If not try it with a new version, it might work then.

JP · Post by JP » Mon Oct 29, 2007 2:08 pm

Here's what i see! (shadows off, debug off, fullscreen off (same with fullscreen on)).

You can see my gfx card from the console.

vi-wer · Post by **vi-wer** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 2:56 pm

It looks like the depthbuffer and background are 'stretched'. I'm using draw2DImage(ITexture,position) to draw the background. Your gfx card/irrlicht probably resizes the image to a 1024x1024 texture. Try to resize the background image to 1024x1024 (or 512x512) with a software and run it again. You should see the same result (or a smaller background). I guess this is done to the depthmap too, that's why it looks s so strange.
I haven't took into account that some gfx cards do not support textures which are not power of 2 but I can fix this and will then upload a new demo.

You can see my gfx card from the console.

Not really but I guesss it's a GF5950FX Ultra

.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 4:05 pm

vi-wer wrote:That's what I expected. You've got an ATI card. On some other forums I've read that the OpenGL features I'm using in this demo are not supported by older ATI cards and their drivers. Do you have the latest ATI Catalyst driver installed? If not try it with a new version, it might work then.

Seems likely, but it's a mobility chip, so the standard Catalyst drivers will decline to install. As it's a work pool laptop, I don't really want to arse around with 3rd party installer hacks. Sorry.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:46 pm

64 X2 4000+, 7600 GTS (DDR3), Open GL 2.1, fullscreen:

With shadows 390
Without shadows 1020

Anteater · Post by **Anteater** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 12:12 pm

I get the same exact effect that JP gets.
N*Vidia GeForce FX 5200 (yeah I know time to update lol)

vi-wer · Post by **vi-wer** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 2:01 pm

It looks like most of you have NVIDIA cards too. But I also would like to know if this does work with ATI cards. I would appreciate it if more people with an ATI card could try it and maybe some older gfx cards like GeForce4 or another from that time (got no idea how ATI called them

).

I uploaded a new version of the demo, you can get it here.
The bug you can see on JP's screenshot has been fixed (hope so). Furthermore I added a new room to see the depthbuffer effect better and some bgm music. ( If it continues like this I'll have a nice litte game next week lol)
What I also would like to know is what you think about the scene. Pretty cool, isn't it?

JP · Post by JP » Tue Oct 30, 2007 2:39 pm

It says it needs zlib1.dll now

etcaptor · Post by **etcaptor** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 3:18 pm

I got 370 fps without shadows and 170 with shadows. geForce 6600.

sio2 · Post by **sio2** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 3:30 pm

1530fps without shadows and 480fps with.

I had to find a download for zlib1.dll before it work work though.

sio2 · Post by **sio2** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 3:33 pm

It reminds me of a game called "Alone In The Dark"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_in_t ... ideo_game)