Moving Features to the GPU

A hidden detail of my previous post on variation and terrain textures: variation for flat textures was implemented using more triangles in the DSF in X-Plane 8, but is implemented in a shader in X-Plane 9.  This means that you don't get this feature in X-Plane 9 if shaders are off.

My guess is that this is perfectly acceptable to just about every user.

• If you don't have shaders, you have something like a GeForce 4 or Radeon 8500, and are fighting for frame-rate.  In this case, not paying the price of layer-based variation is a win.
• If you have shaders, you're getting better performance because the shader creates variation more efficiently than the old layering scheme did.

This kind of move of a feature to the GPU can only happen at major versions when we recut the global scenery, because (to utilize the benefit) the DSFs are recut with fewer (now unneeded) layers.  So features aren't going to mysteriously disappear mid-version.

I do have a goal to move more layering-type features to the GPU for future global scenery renders.  There are a number of good reasons:

• DSF file size is limited - we have distribution requirements on the number of DVDs we ship.  So DSF file size is better spent on more detailed meshes than on layers.
• GPU power is increasing faster than anything else, so it's good to put these effects on the GPU - the GPU is still hungry for more!
• If a feature is run on the GPU, we can scale it up or down or turn it on or off, for more flexible rendering settings on a wide variety of hardware.  A feature baked into the DSF is there for everyone, no way to turn it off.

My hope for the next render is to (somehow) move the cliff algorithm (which is currently done with 2-4 layers) to the GPU, which would shrink DSFs, improve performance, and probably create nicer looking output.