Cityscape – update 5.2

Okay, the 16-bit/lack of Intel compatibility thing was bugging me, so I fixed it, and got, uhm, a few more polygons out of it as a result. How many? How about ~18.5 million polygons per second?

So, what have we done now? Well, I’ve changed the BuildingBatch class so instead of a single huge batch, it creates a bunch of smaller batches of a few thousand (the exact value is easily configurable – the parameter passed into UpdateGeometry() is the number of maximum number of vertices per buffer). This means I can both change the index buffer type back to 16-bit, which means it works on Intel graphics cards again and also squeeze even more performance out of the graphics card. The reasons why a single massive buffer is less efficient than a number of smaller-but-still large buffer is complex – it’s generally agreed that an optimal number of vertices is around the low thousands, though, and experimenting with my buffer sizes bears this out, and if you want a play, you can check out revision 15 from the repository and tweak this batch size in Game.cs – I’d be interested to hear what works best for your graphics card.

I’ve got another update coming shortly, but it’s sort of tangential to the main project, so I’ll stick it in another post.

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