Player shadow kills framerate - why?

powerpop · Post by **powerpop** » Thu Jan 29, 2004 10:33 am

I turned on the stencil shadow for my md2 player character but it brought my framerate down from 150 to 40 - why is that? - if this is just reality then is there any way for me to do something lighter weight (wondering if the shadow can be an oval shape rather than the real image of the character) - anyways, i would love to put shadows in but not if it dogs my framerate so much

i have a great card - ati radeon 64mb (mobile)

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 11:46 pm

I found the same problem with my geforce 4 ti4400 - the quick hack would be to place an alpha blended billboard underneath your player

niko · Post by **niko** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 7:15 am

Did you use the zfail method? Try if it is ok to switch to zpass, it could be faster.

powerpop · Post by **powerpop** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 10:32 am

i tried zpass but it has the same effect - my frame rate is dropping from 150 to 50 in both cases

(which brings me to something else - i am puzzled in the ping app why my frame rate is only 155 with such a simple scene - i have some testers on older nvidia hardware that are showing 300+ fps but my new mobile radeon is chugging - i wonder if this has to do with me running DX9 ?

SwiftCoder · Post by **SwiftCoder** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 3:50 pm

Shadow volumes are going to drop your frame rate, no two ways about it, there are quite a few calculations going on every frame, but that seems like too much of a drop. It would be interesting to profile the app, and see if it is spending most of its time in the shadow volume code, or in the DX 9 DLL.

My mobile radeon seems to have lousy performance compared to the nvidia cards, and even when compared to the normal radeon cards, and that is on a Mac using OpenGL, so I doubt it is DX 9.