Skipping color/normal/texcoord arrays?

[hendu]

I assume at least some advantage can be gained by not enabling unneeded arrays, even though they do get uploaded to the card, since normals and texcoords are already disabled for points and point sprites.

Given they do take up VRAM in the VBO case, would there be any measurable gain there? In the vertex array case there would certainly be, as then it could skip uploads to the card.


I propose a new field for SMaterial, SkipArrays, that would contain flags on whether to not enable colors, texcoords, and/or normals for this drawing.

ESA_COLORS, ESA_TEXCOORDS, ESA_NORMALS...

[Nadro]

You have similar features in shader-pipeline branch (flexible vertex format), so no more options for it is require in my opinion

[hybrid]

Yeah, once you can set which properties shall be used frmt he vertex information, you have these things automatically. Hopefully we can also support some of the features in the fixed function pipeline later on.

[hendu]

OK, I'll just add it for my 1.7 branch then, the FVF is probably still years away

[Nadro]

the FVF is probably still years away

Why You think that?

[hendu]

Oh, I don't doubt that it's usable already; I mean the glacial pace of irrlicht trunk, it'll be years before FVF is in a released irrlicht.

[Nadro]

I hope that we'll surprise a community this time on the pace of implementation time for new features

[fmx]

^ really glad to hear that Nadro
I was also expecting we might not see FVFs properly in irrlicht for some years, judging by past irrlicht releases