Statusupdate 29.01.2021

    • caedes wrote:

      Instancing by itself has nothing to do with multicore CPUs.
      However, most of the work for updating the vegetation around the player will be done in a thread (so it'll use one additional core).

      In my tests currently the performance is limited by the GPUs ability to render that many plants - before it was limited on the CPU, by several factors including uploading vegetation data to the GPU and doing lots of draw calls, but also engine internal handling of the plants - so at that point it doesn't look like Vulkan could improve things much further. However, these tests were very focused on vegetation (and mostly in a testmap), if more vehicles etc are involved rendering them will most probably slow things down a bit and maybe that could be improved with Vulkan in the future (but maybe not).
      Now that we're slowed down by the GPUs ability to render that many plants (or more specifically, that many triangles with plant textures+shaders on them), we're also working on optimizing the plant models themselves to improve performance at bigger vegetation rendering distances, I think that a simpler version of the plants used for ones further away from the player will help there (in the past this didn't matter because we were limited by the amount of plants we could render, almost independent of how complex a single plant model was).

      Just to be clear, this will not be part of the next update as it's still work in progress, but we hope it'll be done within the next few weeks.
      All of this has been beautifully described and it looks promising and generally, but this game with the development of what OpenGL is now in today's technology, the game will hold back to some degree in terms of progress. The game will have to switch to something new, because it will deserve more interesting solutions, because the game is brilliant in my opinion. But I can also imagine now (I know it sounds strange now), but what will happen in the future on the current engine (for example, when potatoes or beets will come to the game), as a novelty what will happen then. I suppose there will be another core for solving them, I suppose.