Irrlicht Engine

I just ran a sort of stress test on an RTS game I've been working on, having a little over 1000 units on the screen, each with a 182 poly core mesh and a 318 poly armor mesh (both of which have a 512x512 bmp texture), with lighting disabled (totals at around 500,000 polys). My card is a NVidia 6800XT with 256mb, and the program ran at 1280x1024.

I printed out the time in milliseconds each part of the while() loop took, and unsurprisingly the only thing that took more than 0 was "irrSceneMgr->drawAll();" What did surprise me, though, was that OpenGL was the best of all the drivers. Here are the results:

Software: 2937
Burnings: 1328
D3D 8: 171
D3D 9: 156
OGL: 62

Granted, this is not the most accurate of benchmarks, but the results surprised me none-the-less. Is OpenGL always faster than D3D? Is D3D10 any much faster?

It's not what you've got that matters, it's how you use it. :)

Wait, what?

What version of Irrlicht? What DX dlls (the SDK ones, or the distributables)? What driver versions? Debug or release build?

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Oh... wait... I lied.

Ion Dune wrote:Is OpenGL always faster than D3D?

No.

You could post a demo and have a look at other people's results?