Hi!

I have a level. After level loading i call sc_setup() in main function. So far so good. But when i place grass models ( with alpha textures ) my framerate is completly down. I use lod and clipping / scene management. When i dont call sc_setup, everything is fine ( +-55fps in fullscreen ).
I customized shade-c that it only includes refract, water and object shaders. So no DOF or something like that, same result.

Summary: Calling sc_setup in combination with about 300 grass models (with alpha textures) kills the framerate. What can i do to avoid this ? Has somebody an idea what causes this fps drop ?

and again thank u 4 all tipps

Merge your grass models to one mdl.

EDIT: Or place / remove grass based on a seed map during runtime just around the player.

Do as Pad said, or search for the problem itself. Shade-C has nothing to do with your grass and they alpha channels (it worked pretty nice for me before).

I already place / remove the grass based on seed map. As i said above, framerate drops when calling sc_setup, with no seeable reason for me !

edit: I changed grass models same result. Its an empty map. Grass created (around the player) via seed map. 55-60fps. Call sc_setup = fpsdead.
edit2: But i see...theres no known issue with this problem.

Share your demo?

Thank you but i take a closer look into first. I just wanted to know if this is a known problem before ill look deeper into it.

maybe ill upload a demo, if i cant find the problem.

Thank you guys.

Just one idea:
Do your grass models have an alpha test material, i.e. not blending? Vegetation scenes are oftentimes slow because many overlapping polygons result in a lot of additional alpha blending which results in a much higher amount of pixels to be drawn. If you use an alpha test material, the edges won't be as nice but the z-buffer can be used and the scene will be rendered much faster.
I don't really know Shade-C but could it be that the grass models are then rendered with regular alpha blending and thus you get a lower framerate?

or if you set a shade-c shader for grass models, their creation could be slower than without shade-c.

imo runtime seeding is not a fine thing, especially if you run 300 functions with 300 wait(1);, it slows downs things, it's better to keep performance for your characters...

as above mentioned, alpha testing instead of alpha blending helps, or simply set OVERLAY, it is the fastest (grass does not have to have nice border pixel fade out), and using larger grass models (e.g. 6-8 models merged) with very early clipping (max 1000 quants) and lod can be a solution. just take the large grass models from my editor to test it, it's free. I could achieved good fps by them beside using shade-c 0.90 water (running only the corresponding parts of refraction, reflection, dof). and set them UNLIT, it also results in a great boost. in this case you have to tweak their material colours properly, and have to play with alphatransparency value and shadow alpha to get proper shadows. and use vertex wind animation for only the first lod of them.

I'm a bit sleepy (wake up time 4:45), I just hope I wrote no stupid things

Thanks for the tips so far. I had not much time but played a bit around. The statistics panel says 113k Polys. When i call sc_setup the polycount raises up to 10 times which kills ( of course ) the framerate. I have the feeling some pp effects ignores my camera.clip_far / lod - management.


Already done. ^^

So i did

For now i clip the grass models at 600 ( 5% [LOD1] of my camera.clip_far = 120000 ). I have no shadows activated.

Do u mean UNLIT flag of the grass models ? If so i could try this when iam at home later.

At the weekend ill invest some hours to look. I recognized its not only a shade-c prob. If i activate a DoF from Slin fex, same thing happens to my polycount = with same result. Maybe my terrain (HMP) is the bad guy.

Thank you all for your tipps.
greets

Till then

120000 is huge. set 12000