071015 / Drawing in Reverse II

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Back from the photography trip.

I finally got around to doing the reverse drawing with hierarchical Z buffer Z-Cull, and measuring the performance difference with a static VBO. Well the results are in and it is a draw. The benefit was about 10%.

The extra cost of drawing the x/4 by y/4 32bit scaler float framebuffer using stencil, then turning each of those pixels into a 4x4 pixel quad to render Z into the full size depth buffer, and finally doing the full size drawing pass, is too much extra work. The overhead is something like 25% of the original drawing pass, for only a 35% gain.

However

After more testing, the performance found previously by drawing front first was simply a side effect of turning on the alpha test and throwing out ROP fragments with alpha under 0.0625. Stencil test wasn't even needed for the performance increase. I need 16x overdraw at a minimum to draw the frame anyway, and had 32x max in some areas but these were minor.

In the end I need front first drawing for the physics scatter passes, so the front first is here to stay, and as it turns out I got a 10% improvement simply using the alpha test.

What is Next

Still working on the optimization of the engine. I'm taking a 1-2 week gamble on a full rewrite to a new combined overdraw culling and physics algorithm on the GPU. Current CPU time is roughly 16% tree prune, 32% overdraw cull, 16% particle to motion blurred imposter, and 36% generation double precision geometry work (tree traversal, etc).

With the new system I'm moving 50% to the GPU, and optimizing, through simplification, of the rest of the CPU bound code. Also switching my version of the "broad phase" collision detection pass from texture arrays to a mipmaped cubemap (rendering to the various mipmaps seperately). More later when I know if it works or fails!