Thread: Reality Check - Textures Hit Hard

Am I too greedy trying to render 16384 textured vertices at a perfect frame rate?

I'm rendering a terrain, and until now, I've simply had each vertice being coloured by a RGB value. It's time to move on to bigger and badder things, so I decided to get the startings of a texture going.

I'm starting with strictly tiling each "square" of vertices. And now that I've got it working, running around on my terrain is a chore. What used to be smoother than silk on teflon would now make a lumber jack proud. That's right, it's choppy like you wouldn't believe.

I'm not doing anything fancy in the rendering that I wasn't doing before.

My initialization includes:

Code:

...
D3DDevice->SetTextureStageState(0, D3DTSS_COLOROP, D3DTOP_SELECTARG1);
D3DDevice->SetTextureStageState(0, D3DTSS_COLORARG1, D3DTA_TEXTURE);
D3DDevice->SetTextureStageState(0, D3DTSS_COLORARG2, D3DTA_DIFFUSE);
...
// And as for my RenderStates:
// Culling none (CW doesn't help)
// ZEnable true
// Lighting false
// FillMode solid
// NormalizeNormals true
// Ambient 0x00FFFFFF
// AlphaBlendable false

And I call

Code:

if(FAILED(D3DXCreateTextureFromFile(D3DDevice, "C:\\Grass.bmp", &Texture)))
	return false;

D3DDevice->SetTexture(0, Texture);

Just once. Outside of my Rendering.

Between the BeginScene() and EndScene() methods of my D3DDevice, the only code that appears is:

Code:

//Render everything
D3DDevice->SetStreamSource(0, VertexBuffer, 0, sizeof(VERTEX));
D3DDevice->SetFVF(FVF);
D3DDevice->SetIndices(IndexBuffer);
D3DDevice->DrawIndexedPrimitive(D3DPT_TRIANGLELIST, 0, 0, NumVertices, 0, NumPolygons);

So, I'm at a loss where this performance hit can be coming from. And my only guess is that Textured vertices take more time?

If there're any thoughts, I'm glad to hear them. Thanks for reading

That "BIGGIE" definitely did it.

I had no idea that using various coordinates would throw it off that badly. I was using a 128x128 texture and tiling it over and over with:

Code:

Map[TerrainIndex].TU = (float)(XPos & 1);
Map[TerrainIndex].TV = (float)(ZPos & 1);

Where XPos and ZPos are integers cycling from 0 to NumCols/NumRows respectively. Pretty much just "Tiling" the texture. I was worried about the quality if how everything would look if I stretched it out.

But right now, I made one big 1024x1024 texture, and spread it across. I attached a screenshot below (The lighting isn't working completely yet, but that's for another day). That's how pixelated it looks now, and I'm wary about increasing the texture size further.

One last question about the picture below, is that "detailed" (the close up parts worry me) enough for shaders/pixel magic tricks to make up for the sever lack of detail there is now do ya think?

Thanks again, and a lot, for that tip. I'm back to silk on teflon, and that definitely would not have crossed my mind to change.

Bubba, I don't know how many times you've pulled through huge, but thanks again.

I've added the bilinear filtering, which makes everything so much easier to look at. Along with about a million minor changes to the engine in general, I've also added a very crude Procedural Generation and shading (both visible in the screenshots below).

As you can see (or perhaps not), but there are some problems with getting the terrain as smooth as wanted. Currently it's using a method where it just averages the heights of surrounding pixels, and that's the height. Next on the line will probably be writing better algorithms for the height smoothing and for shading (which right now takes the Y component of a Normalized Normal, and just uses that as a ratio for how much of the texel's colour will be used), and then LOD...no matter how big or bad I think I'm getting, there's always something bigger and badder just around the corner.

There are a million steps to go before I reach Perspective's level (I ran across his thread while searching...I forget what now...but boy, is that impressive, and a nice reminder of what can be accomplished).