performance 3d engine

I suggest you irrlicht, on irrlicht.sourceforge.net/. It's easy to use, and compiles on many plattforms without problems. I've found pretty for simple animations, and it has a simple structure. You can port any game to consoles using this engine. This little has every that you need in a game engine, such shaders, skeletal animations, BSP, Network, texture effects and so.

However, Ogre3D is more full featured, and has impressive algorithms for managing multipass rendering effects. But It is so complicated, and has many compiling drawbacks on linux. It doesn't work well with free compilers such Mingw . Needs a lot of requirements and has many dependencies. Personally, I have many headaches using it on my projects. For beginners, Ogre3D is the Hell!!

Crystal is pretty too, but is too big enough, and I've found it slower. Has a lot of features, but its performance is poor compared with other libraries.

Also, I recommend Open Scene Graph (www.openscenegraph.org). It's well formed and builded, trully Object Oriented Based. Has good performance because its optimized for OpenGL, but it restricts your games to run on OpenGL plattforms only. However, it is full extensible, and runs on linux and consoles. Also has a lot of 3d parties software for many purposes.(Characters, terrain, effects).

Hey!! try this one...Wild Magic... its awesome:
http://www.geometrictools.com/index.html

It is a big 3D library, full featured; it advantages on geometric algorithms. Its portable and fast too. But keep in mind that it isn´t ready to use. You should need to adapt it for your game.

G3d is a good one too.

Ogre3d isn't so bad. If you have a linux distro with a decent package manager it works out of the box. On windows it works very easy with VC++ and reasonably easy with Dev-C++. I personally use Eclipse on both Linux and Windows and it's just a matter of setting include directories and libraries for your project.

It's true however that it's a large and complex engine, but it's options are limitless. Be aware, however, that Ogre3d is 'just' a graphics engine, don't expect integrated physics, audio, input, etc. You could also look at using Yake, a game engine working with plugins, eg Newton for physics, OpenAL for sound, Ogre3d for graphics, or any other combination of supported plugins.

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Original post by leoptimus Crystal is pretty too, but is too big enough, and I've found it slower. Has a lot of features, but its performance is poor compared with other libraries.

Then probably something went wrong when setting up Crystal Space. Many people tell me that they find Crystal Space to be faster then comparable engines most of the time. Exactly what setup do you have and what problem did you encounter with performance?

Greetings,

--
Project manager of Crystal Space ( http://www.crystalspace3d.org ) and Crystal Entity Layer ( http://cel.crystalspace3d.org ).
Support the Free Crystal Space 3D Engine! Donate at https://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=649

A good method for verify which engine is the best, is testing all of them on a low profile machine.

I've tested those three engines on a AMDk6 500mhz with a 32Mb SIS540 Graphics accelerator and 128 Mb Ram.

Ogre3D, has a good performance and we can get more than 20FPS on many demos, even on OpenGL. Dx7 driver gives the best performance.

Irrlitch It's so good, Dx8 driver runs fast and it allow to run Vertex Shaders. Terrain Example runs about 16FPS, that it's pretty good for that poor machine. But the most affordable feature is that Irrlicht applications are smaller in size.

But Crystal, well, gives poor results. It's logical that it renders a simple cube with a frame count lower than 8FPS? its examples run too slow, doesn't behave fluid as Irrlitch or Ogre3D.

There has no sense make tests on a P4 3Ghz with a GeForceFX accelerator: all three of them are so good on that machine.