NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains

Yeah, we know we're not a big enough game to force people to upgrade. Our dropping support for Windows XP and requiring 64 bit Windows during the early stages was considered "daring" enough. I know I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw big budget titles doing the same.

We'll leave the next "Battle of Duty" game to require OpenGL 4.4 and Windows 8.1 64-bit.

Call of doodie...

You should do it yourself.. you will get nothing but praise from the people that count

If those people pay $150 for their copies, it just might work!

Older versions which Uber wishes to support, perhaps; OS X 10.9 is at 4.1

Actually latest graphics stack support support both OpenGL 3.2 and 3.3 as well as number of 4.X extensions.
Unfortunately PA don't work with open source drivers at moment due to lack of compatibility profile support.

Also I guess other reason to not using "recent" versions of OpenGL it's Intel integrated graphics on Windows because this also missing newer versions support.

OS X 10.9 has support for 4.1, yes, but only requires 3.3.

I don't know. Over the last several builds, my FPS has gone up noticeably and the input and general choppiness of endgame is much, much better.

Yeah, any game that requires Windows 8 is not going into my collection. OpenGL 4.4 though. . .

I'm pro OpenGL just because it's open and cross platform; or at least any platform that doesnt support it has itself to blame.

Windows 8 though... sorry, that's not a gamers OS. It does not exist as far as I'm concerned. I've tried it. I've even had it slammed my throught. It's just a terrible OS.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts @bgolus

While we're on the topic of optimization, will ram usage significantly decrease as the game approaches 1.0? I know you are far from done optimizing the game, but I heard you say during a couple of livestreams that you struggled a lot with ram usage, particularly on OSX. To make the question a little more specific, do you think a 10 player match on 10 planets will be possible at some point, with only 4GB's of ram? Because right now it's simply crashing. I don't mind playing on "Low" graphics settings.

*Watches talk*
*Looks at rendering code*
*Relizes that I make a lot of memory copies and expensive calls*
*Face palm and starts re-writing code*

Well there are two levels of programming:

1. Making it work
2. Making it work better

Welcome to level 2!

But we need more FPS in game, cause its a big scale game, with huuuuuge armies, and if it starts to lagg the whole fun is gone.
For now i start with 60FPS, but when the game goes on it dropps to 7FPS 3 Planets (Scale 3) 6 Player...
Lof of ppl stopped playing PA cause of lagg...
We cant play on Scale 6 (or lager) planets, cause lagg, so uber has disabled them...

Can someone tell me, how we get a huge system with big Planets working? even Galactic War? If the performance did not drastically improve, we will never see a Galactic War =(

TL;DR: get new soft/hardware for a new game, or we will never see Galactic War...

Right now there is no way to get one "working". If your settings aren't already on low turn then down to low to help with fps.

To put it into perspective, the reason PA lags is(All numbers are educated guesses):

• 1 unit has at least 50 vertices
• A decent game has around 3,000 units per player
• Let's say 2 players
• Thats 30,000 vertices in just units
• There are also lights and particles and terrane which all contribute
• And each of these things has to be rendered many times a second
• This is a lot of load on the GPU and CPU(I'm guessing allot of time is spent copying over memory to the GPU, this might not be true based on how they use buffers)

It will all improve, uber is working hard on improving perf and they just pushed out a lighting perf improvement.

Good catch! I got 3.2 and 3.3 crossed in my brain. And I wasn't aware Mac had 4.1 support. Thanks for the correction.

First, Galactic War will be a meta-game in which you conquer the galaxy one system at a time. It won't use any more resources than a PA game.

Second, OpenGL isn't like a piece of software where you use a newer one and your game gets faster. Its a code library to write software. Uber is rewriting large sections of the software to enhance performance. Personally I noticed a large speed-up with the latest update and they only* instanced lighting in that update. There are still several things left to be instanced including unit icons and units. In fact, as unit icons are one of the slowest things to render right now, a good way to improve performance is to change Show Terrestrial to Range Dependent under the UI tab.

@someonewhoisnobody: Actually the units in PA average around 500 vertices with the more complex ones have upwards of 3500. The teleporter has 3626. So with 6000 units you would have 3,000,000 vertices. Anyway, you point is valid, units dont have LOD yet so that could be another major perf improvement.

*I'm sure there have been a lot of little perf tweaks but that was the big one

Edit: I originally said each unit had around 1000 verts and the teleporter had 7252 but as maxpowerz pointed out, the blender importer doubles up the verts so I was a little high.

Were you using blender to import the units to get the tris count?
if so you may find that blender is doubling up on tris during the import process...

once you load a model in blender select the model mesh, goto edit mode then remove the doubles in the faces sub-menu under the mesh menu item....

you will have a much more accurate tris count then.

and also even tho there is no unit LOD system, there is an impostor system that renders low quality impostor units at certain zoom levels, the impostor units are only 6 polys i think...

the range at which the impostors show has been tuned to make it seemless,
I'm sure i recall bgolus mentioning something about it a while ago in my tree quality reducer mod thread.

hmm... seems your right. So average vert count is around 500 and teleporter would have 3626 verts.

From my understanding the impostor system is only in use for foliage and doesn't yet work with moving objects but I'm not entirely certain. It would be nice to have some dev clarification on this @bgolus please. Thanks.