Horde3D

This is the same ssao scene, and for some reason there is a problem with the shadows passing through the wall.

I have confirmed that the wall does indeed touch the ground, and that the wall is using the same standard shader that casts shadows.

Any idea where this could be coming from?

Full size image

Could you try to set the light ShadowMapCount parameter to 1 and see if there is still the problem?

I know that there is still a bug in the PSSM implementation that makes parts of the shadows disappear. This happens sometimes when the camera is above the light source. I already know what the problem is but the fix is not trivial so it still has to wait a bit.

That is with 1 shadow map, so no issue there.

Also, any idea what part of the standard rendering loop is so expensive that I max out at 7 fps when looking at the scene? The only shader used in that scene is 'standard.shader.xml', and my current pipeline does nothing but the basic forward lighting setup:

It will go up to 450 fps if I comment out the 'DoForwardLightLoop', but I can't see why rendering a single shadowmap of that simple (600 tris) scene is so expensive. It doesn't seem to be fillrate, because I can render an SSAO pass and 4 blur passes (all expensive pixel shaders) without a drop in frame rate.

The shadow map calculation usually isn't that slow, the Chicago sample has two light sources with several shadow maps and runs constantly with at least 45 fps on my 8600 card. With a hundred skinned models...

Might be that is another driver/platform issue? What happens if you disable the shadow map by setting the ShadowMapCount param to zero? Or if that doesn't bring anything, what happens if you remove the shadow check in the standard shader?

Setting the shadow map count for each light to zero, commenting out the entire shadowmap context and removing the shadow check in the lighting shader boosted the chicago sample from 3 fps to 10 fps. Still not up to scratch for a X1600 - especially since it plays Quake 4 quite nicely.

If anyone has a PC with a Radeon X1600, please let me know the frame rates you are getting, so I can see how bad this is...

Can I also suggest that the OpenGL Driver and version strings should be added to the standard logging setup for the next release? I just hacked them in to check I wasn't defaulting to software mode or something.

We have a HIS 1600 Pro here in our lab. I just checked the FPS of my latest working copy. FPS is measured in 800x600 window under XP.

Chicago: 15 fps if complete scene is visible (seen from above)
Knight: at least 45 fps in start-up camera view

BTW, the 45 fps on my 8600 were measured in Vista64 windowed mode. Aero eats a plenty of graphics performance so this should be faster on XP.



That's a good idea, I will do that.

My work PC has an X1650. Tested on XP using the downloaded binaries which run in windowed mode (800x600?)

Chicago - up in the air, looking down on the whole scene - 20fps
Chicago - zoomed in on the ground - 60-70fps
Knight - 40-50fps