ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Water now uses OpenGL shaders

So, in beta5, water is supposed to look nifty. Well, I noticed it slows everything down a bit. Not a lot, but if you rest next to a big lake in the Trollshaws, you might notice the difference with resting in a wooded area. (this behaviour happened to me on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid)

Personally I don't like the idea of graphics becoming too pretty, if if it slows things down (I know I can switch to pure ascii mode, but that's the other extreme)

Oh man, but does everybody have ultra sucky GPU ? :/
I'll probably add a switch to have gfx without shaders

I didn't any shadows at all on my machine at home. On the machine at work, I get them, and it's noticeably slower than beta4 (but still quite playable, other than the save game bugs etc.).

The machine at work has a built-in Intel chipset:

00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2e13] (rev 03)

Not exactly a high-end gaming system.

The box at home has an old Radeon card:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200] [1002:5961] (rev 01)

Making the shadows an option sounds like a really good idea.

Actaully the shadows are precomputed, they should not slow things down.
Were you getting a slowdown near the water ?

Oh and please tell me the water looks neat at least :/

water didnt slow me down really, and it does look better than in beta 4 with just a plain blue square

atan, I would appreciate it if you could tell me what GPU you have.

Actually, ANYONE experiencing slowdowns with shaders, I'd like to see what GPU you have. No need for a full glewinfo unless theres a bug.

greycat: Well, as for your home machine, it IS a 7 year old GPU with only OpenGL 1.3 support. It MIGHT be possible to get it working still, but it'll be slow, so I'm not sure its worth the effort. The non-shader version will work just fine still tho.

Your work machine has the same GPU as Gwai, a OpenGL 2.1 G43/G45 chipset's X4500. Not bad for an integrated, but still integrated. I checked on the intel site, and under linux its pretty much unsupported. Sorry, it'll be faster under windows or if some hacker managed to throw together something, but yes...

Antagonist wrote:atan, I would appreciate it if you could tell me what GPU you have.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G98 [GeForce 9300 GE] (rev a1)

aka an overclocked 8400GS. (Dishonest naming ftl.)

Okay, its a REAL low end, but... its still fairly recent. It shouldn't have an issue with such a simpler shader.

I'll prioritise profiling. Its possible there might be some performance eating bug somewhere, since that GPU should be able to handle most general 3D game settings on low even, and ToME should be taxing it less than they would.

I assume it doesn't render it unplayable, but its a concern because its planned to have some fancier shaders implemented in future, and THOSE might make it unplayably slow.