Game Development Community

AL vs BL?

by Kenneth Eves · in Torque 3D Beginner · 09/24/2012 (8:38 am) · 1 replies

There are several threads on this topic, but most are from old betas.

I've been comparing features / performance of basic and advanced lighting. I'm not seeing a huge advantage in basic with regards to performance.

Are there any major drawbacks to AL providing the scene is well optimized?

I develop on old hardware, figuring that if I can make it run good on this (single core AMD, 2 year old nvidia) it should run good on most any. Frankly, AL looks great and runs way better than I expected.

NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Torque 3D Beginner


Associate Steve Acaster
[YorkshireRifles.com]
#1
09/24/2012 (8:54 am)
Note, basic lighting uses stencil shadows on dynamic objects which is actually quite expensive itself. You can disable shadows in the lighting settings in core/scripts/client/defaults "LightingQualityGroup" - lowest = basic lighting. Disable shadows and lowest and see what the framerate is like as a test.

As you've already noted, scene optimization is important an can tremendously help in keeping a good framerate. LOD everything aggressively and reduce the number of textures on models so that the final LOD only has 1. Every additional texture on a model is another drawcall. The Chinatown demo is not particularly optimized, and my GTS250 struggles with it on normal settings (reducing mesh quality makes it more bearable).

A 2 year old nvidia doesn't sound particularly old - but basic lighting is really for pre-8800 GPUs and the like.