LifeFullOfGames

Project update

• Improved Rain Rendering, textured
• Imporved Scene Lighting, Shading and Textures on the army are more correct
• Improved Grass Rendering, draw more grass blade repeatly onto the bigger billboard (3x)
  
• The grass billboard will be resized as their LOD changing. This has been done under Geometry Shader stage where I tried to implement "Early Z-Test" to reduce the Pixel Shader load.
• Add simple FPS calculation, and print screen function
  

Videos

• 110k Animated Armymen, 110k GPU Rain Particles and 110k Animated Grassblades (updated 31 Mar 09)
  
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Performance Update

• From last week, we had implemented a number of new stuffs that have been mentioned above. After remeasure the GPU load, we found the GPU has to do a lot more works on the PS Stage.
• Fragment Processing (Texturing, Pixel Shader and Frame buffer) become the system bottleneck
• The size of GPU billboard is effectively related to the scene performance. 3-5x bigger billboard can effect 6-7 fps
  
• As I thought, the bigger billboard will result more fragments need to be filled, and this is clearly the large performance hit.
• The solution, I found that we could perform the "Early Z test" in Geometry stage and adapt the billboard size based on the distance from the viewer
• Smaller billboard size will produce a lot less fragments that need to be processed, and the result FPS has been bumped back to normal (~30fps)
• Frame buffer stage, reducing the viewport size has slightly effected the rendering performance as well. 1024p -> 800p help improve 2-3 fps when the post processing is on.