Transparent materials and alpha sorting

[RedFox]

The renderer is a big Change that has the advantage of being very long term and really good FPS-wise, so that's why I think it's the second highest priority (particulalrly as theres really noone else to do it).

Quickest hack to increase performance, would be to put the bucket maps and vectors into ShaderModelRendererInternals. That would save at least a bit on the memory allocation performance.. heh.

[wraitii]

Original change talked about in the topic is now in a patch at #1920.

[RedFox]

Can you give a few screenshots of trees to show the difference?

[wraitii]

Sure. First screenshot is with sorting, second screenshot is all sorting disabled (couldn't bother to reapply the patch).

(fairly big files, didn't want to compress).

[Yves]

At least on this screenshot there are only very small differences and they don't look wrong or unnatural in my opinion.

How is it when the trees sway in the wind? Does the overlapping cause any flickering or other undesired effects?

[Mythos_Ruler]

Sure. First screenshot is with sorting, second screenshot is all sorting disabled (couldn't bother to reapply the patch).

(fairly big files, didn't want to compress).

I really don't see any difference. What kind of performance improvement?

[wraitii]

Similar results in both my Macbook air with GAM 950 and my ≈4 year old iMac:

On Gambia river, after lowering the camera as much as possible (using the start camera) and revealing map:

Without the patch, full rendering of a frame is according to the profiler 170ms. With it, it's 140 ms. I'm fairly sure we could win another 40 ms if bushes used the no-sort material too.

Doesn't seem to be any artifacts but I invite you to test it out.

Obviously this only speeds up tree rendering when there are lots of them.

For the record, I think we could also use alpha test on a per-material basis, and it could be another speed up for trees without many changes either.