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Random Buildings: Difference between revisions
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→The old Urban Shader
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The old urban effect, even at minimum quality level, does a lot of texture reading. It needs to iteratively compute the intersection point of your view line with the heightmap, and so needs to read the heightmap quite a lot (if I remember correctly, it might need to read it up to 20 times - most 'normal' shaders read perhaps 1-5 textures). Texture read operations are generically expensive, more so on less powerful hardware. | The old urban effect, even at minimum quality level, does a lot of texture reading. It needs to iteratively compute the intersection point of your view line with the heightmap, and so needs to read the heightmap quite a lot (if I remember correctly, it might need to read it up to 20 times - most 'normal' shaders read perhaps 1-5 textures). Texture read operations are generically expensive, more so on less powerful hardware. | ||
So the urban effect has quite different demands on the GPU than other effects, and there is no reason it should scale like other effects - it is quite possible that it simply doesn't run fast enough on your machine. The urban effect is really a visual hack anyway, we'd strongly suggest leaving it off and using the new 'random buildings' feature instead, as described below: | So the urban effect has quite different demands on the GPU than other effects, and there is no reason it should scale like other effects - it is quite possible that it simply doesn't run fast enough on your machine. | ||
The new 'random buildings' gives a much more realistic look, from above *and* beside, and doesn't do a zillion texture lookups. It does eat some RAM but most people have more RAM than GPU fill-rate these days, when runing FlightGear. (Also you can tune the random buildings density) | |||
The urban effect is really a visual hack anyway, we'd strongly suggest leaving it off and using the new 'random buildings' feature instead, as described below: | |||
== The new System == | == The new System == | ||