A LOT of lights per scene!! Great discovery possible. - by Judith
Flux on 15/2/2008 at 12:29
Quote:
"Some general design tips to keep the framerate woes at bay."
Abru, we know about them and that's what we're trying to uncap. That list was written 3 years ago, with today's cards it *must* be easier to achieve better performance.
Judith; I checked it again I'm sure. Really you should try killing the editor. Here is what I do. Before getting into game open task manager. Get to main menu while playing. Alt-enter. Press windows key. Then click-on task-manager, kill editor. Bring your cursor into windowed thief. Alt-enter again. In my cases, frame-rates rockets.
And it's logical, unlike any other unreal engine t3ed doesn't rebuild lights at all, it's fully real-time. Building nodes only builds "flesh materials". Having a real time editor in the background ticking is like a bomb ticking:)
Ziemanskye on 15/2/2008 at 18:12
I found that maxlightcount property ages ago. Didn't matter what I set it to - more than about 6 lights in a scene still crippled things.
I'll check it again sometime over the weekend though, since I'm on a different graphics card which might help judge a sort of "new minspec" for these things if it makes any difference.
Ziemanskye on 16/2/2008 at 17:24
4096x4096x256UU room
6 lights: 12fps
16 lights 4fps
Made no difference what I set that property to, just like when I played with it before. And that's without anything *at all* in the room (just the lights and a player start), using basic hold-L-and-left-click lights (radius 64, Omni, white).
So thats a WinXP 2.4Ghz 512Mb RAM + GeForce5500/256Mb and a WinVista 1.8Ghz (Turion64x2) 1Gb + GeForceGo6150@256Mb-shared it's not helping with.
OrbWeaver on 16/2/2008 at 21:02
It seems a bit unlikely that there would be a parameter with the purpose of introducing an unecessary performance drop when an arbitrary light count was reached. More likely the maxLightCount value is used for something entirely unrelated to rendering, such as diagnostics (e.g. the "Show Flesh overlit geometry" render mode, which IIRC lit up surfaces red or green depending on the number of lights hitting them).
Judith on 17/2/2008 at 12:49
But there is a change on systems with cards newer then 5xxx series. I had the same problem as Z, more than 6 lights: half the fps, after changing this parameter I could make much more of them. If there was a reason for locking this value it was probably due to system specs at the time of release. Maybe devs wanted to have uniform performance on the machines the game was supposed to be played and they had different PC configs at work.
Ziemanskye on 17/2/2008 at 13:13
Quote Posted by Judith
But there
is a change on systems with cards newer then 5xxx series.
Might have to narrow it down a bit more than that: 6150go is barely in the 6xxx series, and may not count anyway as a mobile/laptop chip, but it's still not a 5xxx.
Still, at least people know if they pull this trick I can't play their levels. Not that I can play most of them anyway...
New Horizon on 17/2/2008 at 14:30
Quote Posted by Judith
But there
is a change on systems with cards newer then 5xxx series. I had the same problem as Z, more than 6 lights: half the fps, after changing this parameter I could make much more of them. If there was a reason for locking this value it was probably due to system specs at the time of release. Maybe devs wanted to have uniform performance on the machines the game was supposed to be played and they had different PC configs at work.
Remember the Xbox. They locked a lot of stuff down to keep their levels well within the limits of xbox specs. That doesn't mean they didn't need it for PC's too...as many PC's at the time would not have been able to handle the shadows either. Just be careful about setting the limits too high, otherwise it will likely hurt performance on folks still using lower end specs.
massimilianogoi on 25/2/2008 at 16:24
Nice work Judith! :D :D
But if you have all this knowledge, why you don't put it into thiefwiki? :D So it's more accessible for everyone...
