You can lower the vertics count by using triangle instead of quads. Scale up the triangles and the texture coords down to 1/4.
Perhaps that brings few more FPS.
I've tried triangles instead of quads, but on my system the fillrate is the main bottleneck... and the tris are larger then the quads, which leads to fewer fps. I might try triangles again, on computer other configurations.
EmperorLiam said:
I think you could really optimize this by increasing the width of the quads the farther out you go, there by decreasing poly count and math related to skinning etc.. have to tile the grass tex on the wide quads of course.
Thanks for the tips.
I have experimented with different sizes, and LOD, where I reduce the number of quads farther away, but I haven
I have extended the techniques and worked on creating forests… I have no nice screen shots with both the grass and trees, but this forest picture will do for now.
The view distance in the screen shot works good for newer more expensive cards (there are so many cards), with a shorter view distance, I get 60+ FPS with a GF 7300 LE. The code and shaders are very inefficient and unoptimized at the moment… so I don't think the frame rate now is a good measurement.
I would like to dive a little deeper into it to see how you achieved it. Can you give some more details?
I will probably post some source later, when I've had time to clean it up a bit. If you want to know more I guess you have to ask more specific questions :)
Would you be so kind to share some shader programs with the public? I am working on grass to in my opensource project. Would be nice to know how you are doing it!