[SDL] Bad performence problems
darkplastic
darkeninghorizons at hotmail.com
Fri Aug 11 12:19:17 PDT 2006
David Olofson wrote:
>
> On Friday 11 August 2006 03:05, darkplastic wrote:
>>
>> I have been working on this one algorithm for days to try and make
>> it work at a reasonable speed but to no avail...was hoping meyb u
>> guys could help! :)....firstly my coputer specs: athlon 2100xp 1gig
>> ram r9800pro gfx card.....
>> At the moment i am writing a top down shooter, and i
>> am trying to write an algorithm that darkens the whole screen apart
>> from a circular area around the player using the folliwng algorithm
>> that i made:
> [...]
>
> I'm doing this, although not to this extreme extent, in Kobo Deluxe.
> Though there is (of course) a frame rate hit, it's pretty much
> insignificant on anything better than a Pentium II. (And even so, it
> can be turned off, if you really need to.)
>
> My solution is very simple: A black overlay (actually includes some
> framework graphics, but that's not really relevant to this
> discussion) with an alpha channel that creates a smooth "shadow"
> inside the frame of the playfield.
>
> When using SDL 2D rendering, I just SDL_DisplayFormatAlpha() this
> overlay surface with RLE acceleration, along with all other graphics.
> On platforms that can provide a double buffered hardware screen,
> "SemiTriple" buffering is used, which means the changes for each
> frame are rendered into an off-screen software surface and blitted
> from there to the display surface, and then a flip is performed. On
> platforms that will only provide a "single" buffered software display
> (like most Un*x systems running X11 or similar), rendering is done
> "directly" into the display surface - no special tricks needed.
>
> When using OpenGL (through the old glSDL wrapper), I make use of
> normal OpenGL source alpha blending. (Since it's hardware
> accelerated, the CPU/VRAM issue is avoided, so no strange hacks
> needed for performance here.)
>
>
> If you're stuck with software rendering (which you are, unless you're
> using OpenGL directly or via some version of glSDL), there are two
> important things to keep in mind:
>
> 1) Alpha blending is a read-modify-write operation, and
> reading from VRAM is usually very, very expensive on
> modern PC hardware. Thus, when doing significant
> amounts of alpha blending, doing all rendering into
> a software surface, and then blitting that to the
> display surface is often much faster than working
> directly in a hardware display surface.
>
> 2) Alpha blending is rather expensive per pixel, compared
> to plain opaque blitting. However, when using SDL's
> RLE acceleration this impacts only pixels that actually
> are translucent. Transparent pixels are skipped, while
> opaque pixels are copied. Thus, there can be a lot of
> speed to gain by keeping the alpha channel clean, and
> not using more translucency effects than absolutely
> required.
>
>
> //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
>
> .------- http://olofson.net - Games, SDL examples -------.
> | http://zeespace.net - 2.5D rendering engine |
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> | http://eel.olofson.net - Real time scripting |
> '-- http://www.reologica.se - Rheology instrumentation --'
>
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>
Thanks so much for your help, i manged to create a hardware accelerated
black fade surface and make the whole map dark but however i am a bit
confused as to how exactly to set an alpha channel that creates a smooth
shadow, i hear that there is a way to set alpha on a surface depending on
the greyscale of another or something? but i cant seem to find a way of
doing this. Thanks in advance.
-James
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