Framerate optimizations in the trunk, R2256+

[joevenzon]

With R2256 I committed a bunch of optimizations to try to speed up the framerate, especially on dense tracks with a lot of objects. Part of the optimizations traded CPU calculations for GPU calculations -- that is, less computation for the CPU but more for the GPU. On my system (AMD X2 3800+, geforce 7900GT) the framerate improvements were enormous; in Kyalami for example my framerate went from about 30 FPS to 100 FPS in one area I was using as a benchmark.

I'm curious if anyone sees a DECREASE in framerate with the optimizations in R2256. If you want to do a comparison, you can disable the optimizations by changing src/track.cpp line 862 to:

[FFuser]

It give an increase for me too:

Kyalami
30-40 FPS With optimizations (drops once to 25 FPS)
25-36 Without (drops once to 20 FPS - at the same place as above)

Note that my settings are rather low (distance level low) because I have a bad graphics card:

intel i915 / 945 GM
Processor: intel Core 2 Duo (2.16 Ghz) 64-bit

Note that I ran in single threaded mode:
multithreaded crashes on me:

[joevenzon]

Hey, thanks for the data point -- since this improved your framerate even with a fast CPU and slow GPU it sounds like this optimization was a win.