DP water

[deathmedic]

I've always wondered why the water effect in darkplaces massivly reduces the framerate when it's turned on.

with all the goodness turned on apart from the water i get a stable framerate over 60fps with nothing to reduce it.
As soon as I turn it on it all starts to slowdown when facing water then speeds up when water isn't in view, but the overall frame rate is reduced to about 50fps or lower.

I'd of though a Phenom x4 and two ati 4870's would be able to handle it, but seems it can't.

[Spike]

because it requires rendering the scene 3 or so times instead of once.

[hondobondo]

I've always wondered why the water effect in darkplaces massivly reduces the framerate when it's turned on.

with all the goodness turned on apart from the water i get a stable framerate over 60fps with nothing to reduce it.
As soon as I turn it on it all starts to slowdown when facing water then speeds up when water isn't in view, but the overall frame rate is reduced to about 50fps or lower.

I'd of though a Phenom x4 and two ati 4870's would be able to handle it, but seems it can't.

the general rule in graphics rendering is "the prettier the slower"

[Dark$oul71]

the general rule in graphics rendering is "the prettier the slower"

Plus the fact that we are takling about an old engine here (even if it's extremely revamped).
That is the same what you can see if you play SDQuake...lot of enemies plus certain graphic effects (namely flames) turn your PC into a snail although it is cabable to run modern games with much more detailed graphics fluently.

[qbism]

Water reflection+refraction is very expensive compared to refraction only. The fastest water effect example I can think of is kmquake2, very fast water effect, but no reflections.

[Boss429]

Is there a way to do a prerendered reflection that only reflects the world and not entities in Darkplaces? this seems like it would greatly increase framerates.

[leileilol]

dp_reflectcube

Basically, you first render an 'envmap' ingame where you have your water with a console command that calculates it all. I forgot what it was called

THEN you fix up your custom water shader to use that envmap as a dp_reflectcube


And yes, it does freaking increase framerates while sacrificing reflection functionality. This method has been a dirty water reflection alternative for the early past decade when Geforce3/FX was the consumer choice. Technically the Geforce256 can do it too, but without refraction of the cubemap and I don't know if DP has gf256 support for it.