Hey. i've been working on my engine for a while now and everythings coming together nicely. its all shader based and it implements multipass rendering and hierarchical frustum culling. but now even if i take out every pretty effect and i simply render a large amount of stationary textured models in a single rendering pass my framerate is stil not reaching 60fps on my reasonebly high spec pc (the fact that everything is stationary means that my engine only calculates the world transformations of everything once and then never again) i sort my draw calls by shader then by VBO and then by texture (in above mentioned scenario theres only 1 shader since only 1 pass is needed and all models are placed in the same VBO and all textures in the same texture atlas so it never needs to rebind anything) to render the above mentioned glDrawArrays gets called about 6000 times (once for every static mesh). this is probely not enough information for you to pinpoint my problem but i was hoping for some suggestions on what you think could be the problem. Or maybe advice on how i should proceed in finding my problem becuase it feels like ive hit a brick wall on this. Thnx in Advance!

Hey thnx for the quick replay.

just one thing

i know nothing about profilers. im stil kinda new to all of this and 'profiler' is a magick word ive only seen a couple of times in random threads here on gamedev. so can you maybe advise me something specific? does the language matter? my engine is written in java and it uses the LWJGL opengl binding.

Thnx!

Two things you might want to consider. First, use glDrawElements instead of glDrawArrays; it may be significantly faster on newer hardware. The other thing to consider is your sort. If you have 6000 elements and you are sorting them before every draw call, this racks up time quickly. To give you an example, I wrote a program that creates a vector of 6000 floats, initializes them randomly, and then sorts them 6000 times (note that they remain sorted after the first sort, but the std::sort algorithm must still check with each call to make sure they are in order). One call to sort on a vector of 6k elements is about 0.00888545s on my 3.0GHz Core 2 machine. This means that 60 calls to sort would be about 0.5s ! That's way too much. I don't know if you are sorting your meshes every frame, but if so you may want to consider a better strategy. Usually, breaking them up hierarchically so you have less to sort, and possibly having a flag if the order is not changed, may help a lot. However, like SiCrane said, a profiler will help identify you problem specifically.

Well, actually 'profiling' almost always comes up when someone asks "why is this so slow" [smile].

Here's a list of some Java profilers. If you're using eclipse you might also check out the eclipse profiler.

wel im not going to try and explain my method of sorting since it'l take to much time but it does involve a 'clean' flag and it is 'hierachical' in a certian sense and the problem does not lie there (at least in the scenario in my OP sorting only happens once and never again)

i can try using glDrawElements maybe but even if that makes it any better i dont think its going to make the huge difference im looking for (46fps -> 60fps)

I'l check out that list of profilers (and i am using eclipse :P)

Thnx!

Thnx. il firstly do what Zeds suggested as soon as im home from work