software renderer performance

[donkeykong]

I'm thinking about using Irrlicht to generate 3D people on a relatively simple stage, which might just be a flat surface, but I plan on using the software renderer to do this sometimes.

Does anyone with experience using the software renderer know if it's feasible to put 32 decent-looking 3D people on a stage and animate them? Would it even be feasible to do 64 people? "Decent-looking" might be something like a GTA3 pedestrian or something a little worse than that.

I'm thinking the system would be 1Ghz CPU with 512MB of RAM. Any help would be appreciated. Also, if anyone has any links to projects or samples that might show how well the software renderer would work, that would awesome.

Thanks a lot.

[hybrid]

You should probably make your tests wirh burningsvideo renderer, the better and newer software renderer. It has several quality settings, for your scenario you must go for 'just fast', because it's not feasible esle. Check the IrrCompileConfig.h and the SoftwareDriver2_compile_config.h files.

[JP]

Why are you wanting to use software drivers? Are you aiming for a platform that doesn't have hardware acceleration? DX or OGL will give you much better performance so use those if possible.

[donkeykong]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm thinking of systems that don't have 3D hardware, particularly laptops. I would use DX or OGL when it's available, but I'd like to be able to fall back to the software renderer when there is no 3D hardware.

Is burningsvideo renderer a separate project from Irrlicht or just another component of it?

[hybrid]

It's the second software renderer. You might have seen it already if you would have tried the examples by now...

[JP]

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/docu/na ... .html#a155

That shows the available drivers you can specify with the first parameter of createDevice.

[pera]

shaders are more recent (5-6 year), but 3d cards are introduced in 1995, I doubt anyone is using graphic card without 3d acceleration today, I doubt there are systems with 1GHz CPU and non 3d graphic card.
3D graphic cards were introduced with 200MHz PII PCs.

[JP]

Yeah this is a valid point, was Voodoo the first 3D card? it was a helluva long time ago and you're certainly right that if 1GHz is the min CPU spec then you're gonna have a 3D card with acceleration for sure. Laptops certainly do often have shite gfx cards, but i'm sure they'll still have better OGL/DX performance than software.

[rogerborg]

Agreed. I can't think of any 1GHz class laptop that wouldn't have D3D and OpenGL support. Even if the drivers are poor, they are still likely to be as fast as the Irrlicht software renderers.

[Robert Y.]

Hi guys,

there is one problem with this, and that's the reason why I use the software renderer as a backup too: on a lot of machines the hardware is present, but the drivers aren't. In many environments (offices etc.) the user can't install the required drivers, so the 3D acceleration won't work properly.
For instance, in most Windows machines OpenGL 1.1 is present, but unfortunately Irrlicht doesn't support this (only OGL 1.2 is supported). With OpenGL 1.1 drivers, the textures aren't handled properly by Irrlicht and all models will be white. The only way to circumvent this currently is to test for the OGL version and use he software renderer if it's below 1.2 ...

[hybrid]

Yeah , sorry, I still didn't find enough fixes to make Irrlicht work with 1.1. The problem is that I don't see which settings are throwing errors. Moreover, since usually 1.1 lacks the BGRA extension, the Irrlicht color handling will usually prevent a proper rendering. Anyway, I fixed the old software renderer in SVN/trunk, so no color flickering occurs anymore.

[Robert Y.]

The only thing I know, is that Irrlicht 1.0 worked well with OGL 1.1, but since then tons of code have changed...