Hi I have ideas for more NeHe tutorials for speeding games up. The tutorials would be the following: Take a large terrain - which is impossibly slow - ie to simulate a wonderful world a beginner has created but which renders sowly. Then step by step go through the processes to speed things up - ie get it from 0.5 frames per second up to 50 frames per second with the following steps: 1. height map world 2. above with VAs 3. above with Compiled VAs 4. split the world up and only draw what can possibly be seen 5. frustum culling 6. level of detail (ie detailed part of world can be made less detailed if viewed from a long distance. Has this been done on NeHe ?

No this hasn't been done in a tutorial at NeHe Productions, and I doubt something as complete as that has ever been done in any other site.

Moreover you're mixing API-related optimizations (vertex arrays), modeling-related optimizations (progressive meshes), and scene-related optimizations (frustum culling). So I think the result would be a bit messy, though it would be interesting for many, many people out there.

i think the ideas for those tutorials would be great. on the flip side vincoof you do have a point about the API problems. the tutorial could cover a single API (of the writer's choice) and add a LOT of theory into it. this way the reader can derive the ideas and implementation from the tutorial and just adapt it for their maps.

*Turns tape on*
Don't use CVA's, they're redundant these days, are incompatible with modern extensions, and provide no speed benefit. Infact, they may hurt your performance.
*Turns tape off*

At least I have a tape I can play now, when the next person mentions CVA's next week...

Hi,
When I use them in my game CVAs speed things up by about 2 times.

As for most graphics cards use VBOs now - well the new ones do but most people who play games do so on the cheapest pc they could find (most have cheap n cheerful cards) and their pc is about 3 years old - judging by the guys at work who all work in IT and have pcs at home.


cheers anyhow

Quote: Original post by ade-the-heat
Hi,
When I use them in my game CVAs speed things up by about 2 times.

As for most graphics cards use VBOs now - well the new ones do but most people who play games do so on the cheapest pc they could find (most have cheap n cheerful cards) and their pc is about 3 years old - judging by the guys at work who all work in IT and have pcs at home.


cheers anyhow

The CVA extension has been abandoned, and isn't being developed anymore. If you look at the spec, it says that it's unfinished. The extension should only show any sort of speed benefit on pre TnL cards ( that might be what you're talking about by saying "cheap and cheerful cards" ). The fact that it is incompatable with newer, better extensions such as VAR/VBO is enough reason not to use it.

I also keep writing it so this time I'll write it decorated.

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Do not use CVA anymore.
They're obsolete.
I didn't measure any significant performance increase on my system. Sometimes however, I measured well-quantified slowdowns in the range of 10-20%.
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