On 4/13/2011 23:41, Slime wrote:
>  > It's more like "Gee, every other game manages to have really
>  > sophisticated graphics and stuff like geometry for window ledges instead
>  > of just being painted on. I wonder what I'm doing that I can't get 1000
>  > flat walls drawn."
>
> When you put it like that, I have to imagine it's something you're doing,

Yes, exactly. I was hoping i could just be naive and do a 
Wii-quality-graphics game without learning all about how to do complex stuff.

> although I have no idea what it would be.

Apparently, the XBox is slow at restarting the graphics card. If I draw the 
models as 600 individual models, I get about 20FPS.

Switching to instanced drawing (where you draw 100 copies of the same model 
in one draw call by first passing 100 world matrixes to the graphics card 
and then writing basically a shader with nested loops over world matrixes 
and verticies), I get 130FPS.

So, basically, setting the texture and vertex buffers are really slow, even 
tho they're all stored on the GPU without needing to transfer them from the 
CPU other than updating pointers. I think I don't know how the GPU 
interfaces to the CPU at the hardware level very well. If I were serious 
about this, I'd dig up a book on GPU assembly language.

> Are you using Direct3D?

I'm using XNA, which is MS's .NET wrapping of Direct3D (at least on the xbox 
- I don't think it uses D3D on the WinPhone).

Fun fact: XNA stands for "XNA is Not an Acronym."

 > Trying to minimize primitives?

That was basically my complaint. It's a simple enough game I was hoping I 
wouldn't have to do that. There's no sweeping vistas or city-size sandboxes 
or even animated models or (at this point) even *moving* models. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

Post a reply to this message