Integrated Graphics Performance

Okay, I need you lot to prepare me for the worst. Let's consider a really modest machine - say 1.5Ghz Celeron with yer typical integrated graphics chip... the sort of machine a lot of potential shareware buyers might own. Exactly how much (little) can machines of this ilk chuck around onscreen? I mean is any sort of 3D work viable? A modest Maplet level? Or would 2D work be problematic enough?

Obviously this is a really loosely defined question - but then figures don't really interest me, I'm more interested in anecdotal accounts of whether or not the B3D/BMax samples die on such hardware or not. I'm thinking about picking up a low-spec test machine, y'see, so would find anyone else's experiences valuable. Am I going to be appalled?

If you use animation in B3d this will be the deciding factor of how many entities you can have.
If you want a lot going on you will have to use a lot of optimisations e.g. (not creating particle effects if they are offscreen,less linepicks per second)

the next limiting factor is linepicks and general game logic.

You can have a lot of entities onscreen (~200)without much slowdown if there is no game logic involved.
If all entities are using some kind of AI then you will notice slowdowns.

Cheers, so 3D is still very much on the table. I'm guessing fill-rate and texture work would be areas that get hit particularly hard too, though.

Well, Celerons will limit the game logic and amount of animated entitys (Like SLunkar said)
The Onboard video will have very limited fillrate by todays standards.(so heafty textures and lots of alpha will eat it alive)

For example I have a motherboard with a mirage2 or somthing along tho's lines.
A quick run though 3dmark showed me a fillrate of only 180-240mps ..not even up to a 16meg TNT2

I had a b3d project(kinda poly heavy 170k but low surface count ,around 150) that would run at 90-105 fps on a 5900fx (1800+ athlon)
that ran around 12fps on the mirage

Intel onboard video might fare a bit better,,,the mirage is a "s3"..:P

Sam

I noticed a performance drop when the camera is right up next to an object and its texture fills the whole screen. Is this to do with fill-rate?

Yup - okay that's some homegrown FX out of the window right there.


Thanks for the info - those figures aren't too discouraging I guess [thinks back to Saturn Quake's framerate].

ok sledge.

Bmax is amazing on it. If you're doing a 2D game. Now finish your @#!*ing game instead of talking about it :)

[GRIN] The last thing I mentioned working on is feature complete (well okay, a handful of lines of code need addnig so players' ships make a noise) - I'm just putting off writing some damn music fer it. I'm simultaneously prototyping code for what should hopefully be a commercial endeavour, which will be 2D, so the BMax info is great - ta for the encouragement!