3D Benchmarker.
This very short article is just giving some information what happens "behind the scene". To understand this better I recommend you download the 3D benchmarker (benchmarker program) and read this text after running the tests.
When I was first introduced to Blitz3D I kept asking people: "my FPS rating is low, how to get it greater?" I got some good pieces of advice but I really didn't know how Blitz3D handled the rendering. There came an idea about benchmarker.
I created a benchmarker and results were quite interesting.
I first noticed that when rendering guys it really matters if you have hidden characters in game. My test for example gave FPS rating 63 when I rendered 30 animating characters (each guy about 750 polys) - but if I put extra 70 hidden characters (which were animating but not in camera viewport) the FPS rating dropped to 36. I also noticed that the zooming doesn't matter in the polycount (I think it's possible to create a LOD system for your character but the details for doing this is out of my knowledge) - the polycount is same if you zoom your camera far away or near to your character.
My test shows that there is quite low effect on which resolution you use. I got same kind of results using resolutions 800x600 and 1024x768.
Another quite interesting result was the use of function Text. I had a screen where there was couple of models and some text, FPS rating was about 170. When I added more text (used function Text 10 times more) I got FPS rating 130. This has been discussed on the forums and solution for this text problem is to draw images as letters to show your text. That way it is much faster (rumour tells that - I have never tested this)
I also tested a full scenery (dragon model, seven trees, high detailed terrain and fog and got pretty good rating. All these tests were made on my AMD XP 2000+, 512MB, GeForce4 Ti4200. Here's a list of my benchmarking results.
Hope this article helps you out to get some kind of view about how many polys its possible to render on the screen.
For a printable copy of this article, please click HERE.
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