Just installed OpenMW; initial impression

[FiftyTifty]

Decided to give OpenMW a whirl. Recorded it with the intent to show the performance issues present.

El Video: http://youtu.be/ySa3YAH8Or0

Description from vidya (to save me from re-typing it ):

Specs:

OS - Windows 7 64bit
CPU - AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE @ 3.4Ghz (stock)
GPU - AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB GDDR5 (Driver ver. 14.9)
RAM - 16GB DDR3 1333MHz @ 7,7,7,24

Rendering Subsystem - Direct3D9

Doesn't support RadeonPro; the Direct3D9 renderer is probably cocked up?

From the looks of it, frustrum culling is broken. Completely.

There isn't any GPU-Z culling.

Headtracking is borked.

Triangles are used to draw UI messages. WHAT BLACK MAGIC IS THIS!?

Ten batches are used for each dialogue message pop-up. Eleven for a message box and a small icon. Twenty for a message box with a picture.

There is the odd crackle at the end of an NPC's speech-greeting-idle-thing.

The number of triangles being drawn, as well as the number of batches, can change drastically by just moving the cursor by a single pixel. Dem pixels, eh?

The water settings make fuck all difference. If they're all disabled, performance jumps. If one of 'em is enabled, or all of them? Your framerate is slaughtered.

Difference between all shadow settings enabled/disabled is 10 fps or so.

Disabling the Object Shader makes no difference.

[scrawl]

Triangles are used to draw UI messages. WHAT BLACK MAGIC IS THIS!?

Yes, that is because triangles are the only way to render on a GPU.

Ten batches are used for each dialogue message pop-up. Eleven for a message box and a small icon. Twenty for a message box with a picture.

Yep. That's how many different textures from the morrowind game files it takes to render that. Ridiculous, I know. Complain to the MW developers.
We had an attempt to implement GUI texture atlasing, but it had problems. Different localizations of MW have different texture sizes, and passing the atlas coordinates to the skins became a nightmare. Also, we would lose the hardware DXT packing of the textures.
I currently have no plans to revisit this, since GUI rendering isn't really a bottleneck. While the batch count does go up, the FPS doesn't suffer as much, since there's no overhead from state tracking or scene graph.

The number of triangles being drawn, as well as the number of batches, can change drastically by just moving the cursor by a single pixel.

Working as expected.
Offscreen triangles do increase the counter, so long as the whole mesh wasn't culled. That's just how the counter works.

From the looks of it, frustrum culling is broken. Completely.

Not that I'm aware of, and I'm sure we would have noticed that sooner. Care to explain how it is broken?

[FiftyTifty]

Starin' at nought but a couple of boxes and crates right at the beginning. That can't be more than five hundred polygons (please tell me that it isn't. If it is, Bethesda...), yet several thousand/tens of thousands of polygons are being rendered.

Edit: About texture atlasing, it's tempting to go through all the lil' objects and merge the textures. Performance an' shizzle. That would be a major pain without Pyffi Toaster. Have any of you lads ever got that thing working before?

[scrawl]

Starin' at nought but a couple of boxes and crates right at the beginning. That can't be more than five hundred polygons (please tell me that it isn't. If it is, Bethesda...), yet several thousand/tens of thousands of polygons are being rendered.

We use baked geometry to reduce batch count, so even if you're only staring at that one box it may just render all boxes in the room anyway.