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Massive FPS drop with Dynamic Light

by Jason "fireVein" Culwell · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 03/06/2008 (12:12 am) · 5 replies

Greetings,

I am getting a massive loss in framerate when I have 5 or more dynamic lights in the mission that are lighting any part of interiors. Is there anyway that I can avoid this? edit- Besides NOT using dynamic lights. :P

Thanks!
-Jase
Jason "fireVein" Culwell's profile picture
Torque Owner Jason "fireVein" Culwell

About the author

http://www.microdotproductions.com - I am a self taught programmer that has been hacking away at code for a little over 10 years now. I am a very passionate and persistent programmer, and gamer. I love challenges and problem solving.

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    Torque Owner TheGasMan
    G.A.S. [+others]
    #1
    03/06/2008 (12:24 am)
    Jase..help us to help you.

    Post your system specs here and let us know what you changed in the engine(if anything).

    Right now you have a help thread posed as a huge guessing game.

    Torque Owner Jason "fireVein" Culwell
    #2
    03/06/2008 (3:40 am)
    Amd Athlon 3000+ 64-bit (2.0ghz)
    GeForce 6600 256MB Video memory
    1GB RAM

    All I have changed is some of the player movement code in updateMove. I also downloaded a port of the starter.fps for TGEA. I'm using DirectX SDK 2007 Novemember, with Visual Studio 2005 Pro.

    I've updated to all the most recent drivers for my graphics card and chipset drivers. Hope it helps.

    Torque Owner Jason "fireVein" Culwell
    #3
    03/06/2008 (3:42 am)
    I should also note that I get the same problem on my girlfriend's machine. She is running AMD Athlon 3200+ 64-bit, GeForce 6150(which actually gets amazingly well performance, except with dynamic lights), and 1GB ram.

    Torque 3D Owner Pat Wilson
    #4
    03/06/2008 (8:23 am)
    Unfortunately the answer (for right now) is to not use dynamic lights.

    The dynamic lighting system has significant overhead in render targets, and more importantly, render target changes. It's doing several renders of each object to calculate the lighting. Also be aware that, for every render of a skinned mesh, it is re-computing the skinning. So a dynamic light on a skinned mesh is a massive slap to the CPU and GPU.

    Torque Owner Jason "fireVein" Culwell
    #5
    03/06/2008 (3:32 pm)
    Ahh, okay. I had a feeling it would come down to just not using them for right now. Atleast I know its not something that I funkered up without realizing it.

    Thanks for the reply, Pat, I appreciate it!

    -Jase