A New Broken Record

For years now I've been harping about ways to keep the number of batches down in your scenery. A batch is a single submission of triangles to the graphics card for drawing. Batches get rendered fast even if they contain a ton of triangles, but changing modes between batches is not very fast, so a few large batches is hugely better for performance than a large number of tiny batches.

To play that broken record one more time, there are two ways that you (a scenery designer) can cut down the number of batches):

• Use a small number of larger textures instead of a large number of small textures, preferably sharing textures between similar scenery elements that are placed nearby. X-Plane will do its best to merge the content that uses those textures into single batches. We call this the "crayon rule."
• Use less attributes in your objects. Attributes usually require a new batch (after the graphics card mode has been changed due to the attribute). So if you've got 1000 attributes in your object, you've got a problem.

Well, with X-Plane 9 I have a new broken record: avoid overdraw!

Overdraw is the process of drawing pixels on top of other pixels on screen. It happens any time we use blending to do translucency, and any time we use polygon offset to build the image in layers.

Overdraw is bad because with X-Plane 9's pixel shaders, most users are slowed down by the graphics card's ability to fill in pixels (pixel fill rate), with those complex shaders being run for every pixel. If you are at a screen-res of 1200x1024 looking at the ground with no objects, that might be 1.2 million pixels to fill. But if there is an overlay polygon covering the ground, we have 2.4 million pixels to fill! That's a huge framerate hit.

Right now there's not much you can do about overdraw. Once MeshTool comes out I will post some guidelines on how you can limit overdraw.

We took a step in the v9 global scenery to limit overdraw: in X-Plane 8 the global scenery tried to hide repetition of flat textures by drawing them over each other with offsets. In X-Plane 9 this is done in a pixel shader (e.g. the texture is analyzed and swizzled in the shader and then drann once), cutting down the number of times we must draw.

If you turn pixel shaders on and off in a flat area like Kansas you might see this if you compare the screenshots - the farm textures are more repetitive without shaders. This gives faster fps to everyone (with or without shaders) by eliminating overdraw.