Can I let the Panda Eat More?

Pipeline
1

:laughing: Messed up title, right?

Anyway

I’ve noticed how Pand3D does a super job at managing RAM consumption. Last time I check my RAM usage during a test run, it was under 200 mb. I’m guessing, even with a completely detailed environment and enemies added to the screen, with special effects and so on… It would be a shock to see the RAM consumption even jump to 256 mb.

What I want to know is, is it possible to let Panda3D consume more RAM to speed the Engine along even better than it already does?

Anything in the configuration for setting RAM standards or even Engine priority?

2

There are a few cache settings that you could increase, but I doubt you’d get much performance benefit from tweaking them.

But you’d be surprised at how fast you can consume RAM with large, complex models and lots of textures. :wink:

David

3

It’s going to be interesting as I near my project to finish then. Just for a test, I placed my main character on the screen five other times (copies), all animated and the Panda continues to stay on its same diet of RAM consumption.

I can’t help but feel, if this sucker would just ‘phatten’ up by eating a little more RAM, more overall speed might be gained…which would lead to having even more animated characters on the screen.

Animated Vertices are expensive thus you can only have so many animated characters, even if they’re really low poly. Unless you don’t mind your frame rate breaking even at thirty.

So far so good…I’m running pretty much at 60 fps with 16x samples. The main character looks really nice for a low poly character, but I do plan on including higher poly model sets with the final release.

I figured it would be a good idea to let the player decide on how smooth looking they want their characters to look. I’m guessing with all the shaders and multiple characters all over the screen, detailed environments and special effects…I’m hoping for anywhere between 50 to 60 fps final at 1280 x 768 res (although res don’t really have any effect on my fps unless it’s a really high one).

Hell…most of the commercial games I play when taking a break play below 60 fps…hell, even below 40 at times. Bio Shock 1 and two will hit 30 flat on me if I don’t remove the vertical sync, but that can also lead to a poor visual effect on the screen.

OMG! Dead Space! God that game’s fps is destroyed by the shaders! No matter what settings I use, it can’t be helped. Shame, because I’m on a 4 processor 3.0ghz with 8gb of RAM (AMD). Nivida Quda Tech card.