Hello All, I''ve completed a XFile loader that loads both standard and skinned x files. It uses D3DX functions, and is based off of the "skinned mesh" example in the SDK. Currently I get 130 FPS rendering "tiny.x" (from the SDK) using an index buffer and vertex shaders (ie indexedvs in the skinned mesh example). I''m wondering if I could possibly get higher frame rates, because if I add another "tiny.x" to my program the frame rate drops more than half, to 60 FPS. I assume that if I had 30 meshes on the screen, the frame rate would be rather low. Is there some way that I can increase performance in my x file loader? If I load it manually, and handle everything manually (this may be nieve of me to ask, because I have no idea how I would do it, though I have loaded other types of models, with much help ), will the frame rate increase? Well, I know the loading doesn''t have much to do with it, but if heard that drawsubset is rather slow, so I assumed that if I loaded it differently I could just use drawprimitive. Which, again, I have no idea how to do but I''d like just like to know I''d also like to know about any other formats that are out there. I''ve only ever heard of x-, md2- and md3-files. What other types are out there? What are their advantages/disadvantages? I should really look at "Focus on 3D models". Any information is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance. ¬_¬

[bump]

I don’t know the difference in performance between using D3DX and manual. But I wanted to at least point you to this article:

http://www.mvps.org/directx/articles/fps_versus_frame_time.htm

that describes why it can be bad to judge your performance based on FPS.

You should probably also list your system specs: CPU speed and graphics card.


[edited by - JimH on February 8, 2003 5:53:04 PM]

I''ve actually read that article before, however I still think measuring FPS is a fairly good way of scaling performance.

My system specs:

Pentium 3 733 MHZ
512 MB ram
64 MB VRAM - GeForce 4 MX 440

I get the same frame rates with my program compared to the dx sample program, however I''d still like to know how I can increase performance.

Thanks for responding!

Using your quoted rendering times, each model costs about 9ms. What kind of hardware do you have and how complexed is the model?
Other formats:
Md2 is too restrictive for now days. It is frame based and has 256 possible vertex positions per axis per frame making detail hard to attain. The original md3 format was an almost upgraded version of md2 with tags so head, body and legs could be seperate. I think bones were added in team arena. You can always make your own. Milkshape is a nice and simple shareware modeler and those models could always be used though animation could be dodgy to build if you want the one model to hold it all.

Thanks for all your input! I will definatly take this all into consideration, and I''ll be experimenting with fileformats and rendering methods in the future.

Thanks again!!