Specs for Darkplaces

[LordHavoc]

Wuh?! I'm sure DarkPlaces supports GLSL shaders.

Indeed it does.

DP has so many techniques it uses to shift work to the GPU, the only things it does on the CPU that can be limiting factors are:
Particles - extremely heavy on CPU, this could be put on multiple cores, or sorting could be turned off for a huge FPS boost but also a quality drop in some circumstances (on principle I haven't implemented unsorted particles so far).
Model animation - extremely heavy on CPU, this can be shifted to GPU.
RTLight world lighting and shadowing optimizations - fairly light on CPU, completely necessary (have tried without it, very bad FPS even on highend GPUs).
Reflective Water - the heaviest CPU task in the engine right now, can be improved, could be put on multiple cores.

[inkub0]

OK we trust your work, great Quake prophet !!!

what about your current work on darkplaces? on what features are you working?

[sb306]

Well I installed the 320gb Hard drive and Im slowly getting all my programs installed. Last week I went ahead and bought a Radeon 4850 to replace the 3870. hehe. I think I have a.d.d. I installed the 4850 and had to use catalyst 9.3 since any newer version was acting like it wasnt the correct driver and would default to 640x480 on the desktop. I just ordered Crysis and Doom 3 so Im going to check those 2 games out. ;-)

[R00k]

Blasphemy! DarkPlaces is the BEST! My ears are bleeding, eyes are crossing, brain is melting, arrrrggghhhhhh!

[LordHavoc]

To quote a rather fun sound mod for Nexuiz: New Toys! New Toys!

DarkPlaces autobuilds (which you can find in the files link near the top of the darkplaces download page) now have:
r_shadow_bouncegrid 1 (adds a radiosity effect in realtime world lighting using photon mapping, a high-cost algorithm normally reserved for offline renderers)
r_shadow_bouncegrid_static 0 (realtime rather than static radiosity - has a significant fps cost but not too bad!)

Enjoy.

There's also ongoing work on the darkplaces software rasterizer - vid_soft 1 (and set vid_soft_threads to a good value for your cpu) to try it out, affects next vid_restart (just like the vid_gl20 and vid_dx9 cvars), but be aware it will never be faster than the OpenGL renderer unless your gpu is truly horrible.

Fun toy to show off on an AMD Phenom II or Intel Core i7 (note: Intel usually wins by significant margins, I guess it just likes the code better), best setting for vid_soft_threads is usually twice your number of virtual cores (so 4x your real cores on Intel i7, 2x on AMD CPUs).

[turtlevan]

To quote a rather fun sound mod for Nexuiz: New Toys! New Toys!

DarkPlaces autobuilds (which you can find in the files link near the top of the darkplaces download page) now have:
r_shadow_bouncegrid 1 (adds a radiosity effect in realtime world lighting using photon mapping, a high-cost algorithm normally reserved for offline renderers)
r_shadow_bouncegrid_static 0 (realtime rather than static radiosity - has a significant fps cost but not too bad!)

Enjoy.

There's also ongoing work on the darkplaces software rasterizer - vid_soft 1 (and set vid_soft_threads to a good value for your cpu) to try it out, affects next vid_restart (just like the vid_gl20 and vid_dx9 cvars), but be aware it will never be faster than the OpenGL renderer unless your gpu is truly horrible.

Fun toy to show off on an AMD Phenom II or Intel Core i7 (note: Intel usually wins by significant margins, I guess it just likes the code better), best setting for vid_soft_threads is usually twice your number of virtual cores (so 4x your real cores on Intel i7, 2x on AMD CPUs).

thanks man. Nice work you do