Alien Arena Boosts Frame-Rates, Enhances Graphics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Alien Arena Boosts Frame-Rates, Enhances Graphics

Developers behind the open-source multi-platform Alien Arena game have managed some performance improvements as well as visual enhancements through some improvements to the engine's renderer...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE2NjE

[MaxToTheMax]

Since it's kind of hard to read the framerate through the Phoronix watermark, here are the key numbers:

	Map rendering, high	Mesh rendering, high	Map rendering, medium
Before	33	25	87
After	56	47	120

EDIT: thanks for the update Michael.

The improvement in mesh rendering is only at high and highest settings, although we are hoping to apply it to lower settings as well-- mesh rendering is now faster on high/highest than on lowest/low/medium! The experimental cvar to turn on the mesh rendering optimization is r_gpuanim. To get the best-performance combination of low-settings map rendering and high-settings mesh rendering, you can select low settings, turn on GLSL shaders and normalmapping, and then set r_test 1 and r_gpuanim 1. In that case, the framerate on that mesh rendering test would be around 90. This awkward situation will hopefully be resolved in our code soon.

[tmpdir]

Nice!... looking at these numbers AA might become even playable on my craptop

[MaxToTheMax]

They've gone up even more in the last couple hours.

[Irritant]

It should be noted that those framerates are taken from a spot in a map that is among the worst performing in all of Alien Arena. Typically framerates are MUCH higher than this.

[FourDMusic]

The article mentioned "visual enhancements", but I can't see anything different. Could someone help me out and point me in the right direction? At the very least it shows they've really upped the frame rate without sacrificing fidelity. Way to go!