Gijs,
This proposal doesn't seem to address the problem namely that 3d clouds and
Random Vegetation (trees) require Material Shaders to be checked in the gui,
and that doing so ran other, unrelated and unneeded shaders. This proposal
is different to, rather than better than the existing. It actually breaks
the water shader effect (I expect that can be fixed), and I don't know what
else - I haven't time to go through everything. In one important aspect it
is worse: the Shader options are not greyed out when the slider is at 0
(shaders OFF), thus it might be inferred that shaders are active when they
aren't.
I can't see any reason for the dependency between 3d clouds and Material
Shaders, but Stuart might enlighten us. Nor can I see any thing wrong with
the shaders controlled by the Material Shader checkbox. In any case, the 3
frame rate killers here are 3d Clouds, Trees, and AITraffic. Compared to
these, the effect on frame rate by shaders is trivial. As an example using
the B29 (with reflect shader) at KSFO I see a minimum of 50 fps with all
shaders off and no 3D clouds. If I switch on all shaders, I get 40 fps. With
all optional shaders off and 3D clouds on, I see 14 fps. If I switch
optional shaders on that drops to 13. If I switch everything on, I get an
unusable 9 or 10 fps.
I'm using a nVidia GTX 260, not particularly powerful by today's standards.
I monitor its performance: with all shaders on GPU usage never exceeds 40%
and is more usually 30% or less. I would suppose that, at least here, the
problem of frame rate is not in the GPU and shaders but within FG/SG/OSG
I would oppose this change on the grounds that it ain't broke so it don't
need fixing, and will introduce unknown problems. If you can assure me that
all ramifications of this proposal are known and fixed, then I might change
my mind.
Meanwhile - I would like to uncouple 3D clouds and Trees from material
shaders, which if possible would fix something.
Vivian
-----Original Message-----
From: Gijs de Rooy [mailto:gijsr...@hotmail.com]
Sent: 20 November 2011 19:06
To: FlightGear Development list
Subject: [Flightgear-devel] Shader properties and dialog
Following up on the framerate vs shaders discussion I made some changes to
the rendering
dialog and the way shaders are controlled. They are meant to make it easier
for (new) users
to get nice framerates, while still allowing the eye-candy that they find
important.
Some "highlights":
* The snow line slider is moved to the Environment > Global Weather
dialog.
* All shaders can be individually en-/disabled via the View > Shader
Options dialog.
* Setting the Quality vs Performance slider to 0 will disable all
shaders, with the
exception of the tree shader.
* Trees can be toggled by a single checkbox click now. No need to
fiddle around with
shaders to get them appear. I did came across a bug
<http://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/issues/detail?id=494> but that is
not related to these
shader/dialog changes.
* Shader enable/disable properties and the quality-level are moved
from sim/rendering
to sim/rendering/shaders.
Some notes:
* I changed some property names (see above), which obviously brakes
some stuff. For
example, aircraft that use the PersistentContrail effect need a little edit
in their .eff
files.
* Now that the notorious "Material Shaders" option/property is
removed, effects should
no longer refer to the /sim/rendering/shader-effects property.
Instead, /sim/rendering/shaders/quality-level should be used instead. That
will disable
the effect when the quality-slider is set to 0.
* The (old) 3D clouds appear to be hardcoded. Right now they still
check the old property
(/sim/rendering/shader-effects). Therefore, you will not see 3D clouds by
enabling the
checkbox like it used to be. Local weather clouds works fine though.
Because it breaks some stuff I decided to create a merge-request, so anyone
can test and share
comments, ideas and patches.
Here is the merge request:
https://gitorious.org/fg/fgdata/merge_requests/122
Enjoy!
Gijs
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