This is a new rendering engine for RVGL based on
programmable shaders, targeting OpenGL 2.0+, ES 2.0 and 3.1+ Core Profile. It's very different from the fixed pipeline used by v1.2 and current RVGL, and mapping many of the features supported by the existing renderer was a challenging task.
Expected benefits:
- Significantly improved performance on almost all modern cards.
- Better power efficiency on laptops and mobile devices.
- Possibility of having RVGL ported to GLES platforms like iOS / Android.
What is supported:
- Lights and shadows
- Fog (including vertical fog)
- Mirrors, semi-transparency
- Environment effects (using multi-texturing)
- Mesh deformation effects (waterbox, splash, etc)
- All particle effects
How to use:
The shader-based renderer is now part of the usual RVGL releases! Download the latest RVGL build from the
RVGL project page. Then, edit
profiles\rvgl.ini and set
Shaders = 1 to enable the shader-based rendering mode. If the
shader mode was activated properly, the build number display in Frontend should turn yellow.
See the dedicated thread for Android related information.
► Comparisons and Screenshots
Below is a frame rate comparison against the old renderer version on my laptop running Linux (click for a larger version). With a modern GPU, more than 2x frame rate increase has been commonly reported.
Some more screenshots follow:
- Unlimited transparent polys (in addition to improved frame rate...)
- Utilizes hardware face culling which better handles asymmetric polys.
► ANGLE Direct3D Support
On Windows systems with poor or non-existent OpenGL support, the shader edition can take advantage of
Google's ANGLE project which provide a compliant GLES2 implementation based on Direct3D9 or Direct3D11. ANGLE libs are included with this release. To use this support, open
rvgl.ini and set 'GLProfile' to 3.
► Supported OpenGL Profiles
The 'GLProfile' rvgl.ini option accepts the following supported values:
- 0: Compatibility profile - attempts to initialize a backwards compatible OpenGL profile (the default). An error message will be displayed for versions less than 2.0.
- 1: Core profile - attempts to initialize a 3.2+ Core profile. In some cases, driver support may be better when using a core profile.
- 2: ES profile - attempts to initialize a GLES 2.0+ profile. This either requires a mobile GPU, or in the case of Desktop GPUs, driver support for ES emulation.
- 3: ES profile through Driver (ANGLE, etc.): Same as above, but attempts to use an alternative ES implementation rather than the one provided by your Desktop drivers.
It looks like the anti-aliasing setting also works now and although my laptop can only handle x2, I'm sure others benefit from the performance improvements enough that they can turn this up to x4 or x8!
