I’ve decided to create a new thread rather than post in Krilnon’s, in order to have a molehill specific thread, rather than a general FP11 one.
Obviously with 3D focused discussion, targeted at me, bwhiting, sHTiF, and anyone else who is interested.
First impressions - although initially confusing, shaders are heavily simplified with AGAL. Should be relatively easy to get some decent shaders working.
Same with the general pipeline of molehill. Looks confusing, but should be relatively easy to bolt onto an existing 3D engine.
**Performance - **Pretty much what I expected. Not quite as good as advertised from some of the demos on an average rig. Obviously those were running on high end gaming PC’s.
Using complex shaders, performance is unacceptable on a laptop graphics card (which is going to be a large part of the target audience, playing webgames, rather than hardcore, dedicated PC gamers).
On away3D’s MD5 and OBJ demos with some nice complex shaders, I get 15 fps for both. The poly count is low, 3000 and 18000, presumably that’s totals, so around 1500 rendered and 9000 rendered.
The liquid demo is far more impressive. 79,000 polys runs at 30fps on my laptop. I have a dual core processor and a humble GeForce GO by the way, I’m a console gamer, not PC.
Which shows that in a real, in game scenario, on a machine with a humble graphics card you should be able to achieve 20,000 or 30,000 rendered polys at 60fps, if you’re conservative with shaders. These days shaders use more juice than polycount, GPU wise.
**Software fallback - **Not so impressive. In fact, thoroughly unimpressive.
At lower level control, how can the software fallback be MUCH slower than the performance I’ve got out of pure AS3 in 3D rendering?
I compiled the Molehill Teapot demo with and without GPU mode.
There’s only around 500/550 rendered polys, hardly anything, and a VERY basic shader just rendering interpolated colours between vertices. Basic vertex colour really.
I remember reading about this technology from a 3rd party company they were implementing, that runs a pure software virtual GPU on uncompatible machines.
Well, rendering these 500 polys uses 40% of my CPU at 60fps.
Rendering 500 or 600 polys in my 3D engine, using pure AS3 and drawTriangles uses only 10% at 60fps.
Bear in mind that’s with an uber basic shader, with dynamic lighting and normal mapping, it probably wouldn’t even do 60fps with those 500 triangles.
That means running molehill produced 3D content on a netbook or any basic laptop is unrealistic. I’ll probably do a manual fallback to my own software rendering unless the release version of molehill proves much better in this regard.
But the software mode aside, it IS exciting, and let’s update this thread with anything new we discover about it, performance tips etc.
I’d be very interested to see a benchmark against Unity too, for pure rendering, with some basic dynamic lighting. I would do it, but I don’t use Unity.