| ? posted by Orpheus |
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the fact, that some dingbat (wonders if dingbat is another UK cussword  )wasted a vote, by selecting the 5000 option, tells me we have little real use for a polling system 
seems to me, that if its that unimportant to someone, why bother :/ |
YES!!! Someone commented on that!!!
Actually, the whole r_speed issue really is too specific for gauging performance, like what's been said earlier, framerate is truly the "better" estimate. One reason that certain area can get away with higher w_polies can be acredited to many factors, here's some of the higher ones.
Context/Texture changes- Areas that have fewer amounts of textures in the region will definitely perform better because there's a bottleneck when the renderer has to change textures. This is actually a biggie, and it's one of the reasons why Q3 was able to get way with fairly detailed terrain maps Team Arena. Again, this is not specific to the HL engine, any engine worth anything this should definitely improve performance.
BSP Tree construction- This mainly has to deal with the leaf nodes created when the map compiles. It's kinda hard for mappers control this, although editors have given more and more control over this. Basically, the world divided into series of bounding boxes called vis portals, these create the Potential Visibility Set. These portals are stored in the leaf nodes of the tree. First the engine determines which portal the camera's in, then it determines what nodes are potentially visible from that node. From there, it gets a much smaller set of geometry and can remove a lot the unseen geometry from there. The less nodes made, the less paths the engine has to search for PV nodes, thus increasing performance.
Entity/Static Polygons- This one's pretty simple. BSP geometry is rather slow(but accurate for collision detection). The reason it's slow is because the engine has to send geometry to the video card one face/polygon at a time due to both texture coordinate difference and lightmap(textures that simulate light) coordinates. Entity and Static polies render much faster since they can send all polygons and texture coordinates to the video card at once. The video card likes things in batches, the more you give it at once honestly, the better, it reduces the amount of transfers going through the AGP(going from the vid card to CPU/RAM is even slower).
Those are probably the three major factors behind performance, and why r_speeds honestly never was a good measurement of performance, it was just used as a tool to where to start looking for improvements.
That's kinda why I did put 5000, because theoretically, the engine might perform great if you really know how to work within those bounds.
[addsig]
that's bizarre and I live here!
[addsig]
