WARNING: This is a technical graphics rendering post! If you are not interested in the nitty gritty of OpenGL performance optimization and what I did this week, then what you should know is “Hey, we’re making the game faster!” and “Well, you should probably update your drivers if you haven’t done so already.” The fact of the matter is that this is a blog post that will be most interesting to people with an interest in graphics programming, but this is a game development blog after all, and this is game development!
(We’ve left a whacky animated gif at the bottom of this post as a reward for making it all the way through. No cheating! -ed.)
In unrelated news, you shouldn’t let cultists run your farm.
One of the things that has been talked about recently in the graphics programming community is the problem of driver overhead. Every time a graphics programmer makes a drawing call to the video card, the driver sits in between your game and the video card and looks at everything the game sends it. It checks to make sure you didn’t feed it garbage and that everything is valid, so that you don’t end up crashing the computer in a fiery blaze of glory or a blue screen of death. These validations add up and take time – every time you switch states, every time you change textures, and every time you draw something, the little man in the driver needs to go through and sort it out. This takes time, and slows the game down.
