Wait, you’re talking about a performance drop from 700fps to 350fps?
Although this sounds like a 50% drop in performance, in fact it’s almost negligible, because at frame rates like this the smallest change in frame time makes a huge difference in the fps.
Instead of comparing fps, it’s usually more meaningful to talk about frame time, or 1/fps. In this case, the performance difference you’re talking about is 1/350. - 1/750. seconds, or about 1.4 ms. So something in the new setup requires an additional 1.4 ms to process. That could easily be the additional overhead of creating a ClipPlane object internally or something like that, and in a normal scene, the additional 1.4 ms would easily be lost in the noise.
Yeah, I know that in most cases differences like this mean nothing and I probably shouldn’t care about them. I might have overreacted about this – that happens to me sometimes… Luckily, not that often, heh. I just don’t want to leave any mines on my road unnoticed and might have acted paranoid about it. Maybe it’s just that I’m not used to working with this high frame rates? On my old system they were out of reach.
Anyway, I find it interesting that setting the texture one way is more demanding (even if it’s only that little more) than setting it another way, when in fact I still have only one texture in both cases. But I guess if there ever was anything wrong about this, it would’ve been noticed before.
I’ll just keep working with this. It seems to work fine.