Finally, Unity 2.0 is out. Took a bit longer than we expected (but not 3.1415926 times longer, so we’re all good), but now, after half a year in beta testing, over a dozen alpha/beta releases, it is finally shipped. Feels good!

It’s been in active development for about a year (though some of 2.0 features were in development for much longer), with source control commits graph looking roughly like this. We pretty much spent the summer doing 800 svn commits/month with about four major code monkeys :) Now that the release is done I fully expect the graph to drop off to low values again (is it called “burnout”?).

Last week there was the first Unity conference, and it was a blast. It was like, oh my, it’s full of people and all about unity! In other words, really really cool.

The night before the conference was spent in the hotel, doing last tweaks to the website and launch demos. If the presenters during keynote talk looked confused or exhausted, that’s a combination of trans-Atlantic flight and this last night of work. In fact, the very last fixes to the website were done during the keynote… oh well, Murphy’s law for the win.

Now what? Time to start working on Unity 2.x release :)

San Francisco, here we come.

The common knowledge is that drawing stuff in OpenGL is much more faster than in D3D9. I wonder - is this actually true, or just an urban legend? I could very well imagine that setting everything up to draw a single model and then issuing 1000 draw calls for it is faster in OpenGL… but come on, that’s not a very life-like scenario!

At work we now have a D3D9 and an OpenGL renderers on Windows. The original codebase was very much designed for OpenGL, so I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it fully working on D3D… small differences that add up, like: there’s no object space texgen on D3D, shaders don’t track built-in state (world, modelview matrices, light positions, …), textures in GL vs. textures + sampler state in D3D, and so on. Anyway, the codebase was definitely not designed to exploit D3D strengths and OpenGL weaknesses, more likely the other way around.

But wait! I look at our benchmark tests, and D3D9 is consistently faster than OpenGL. Some examples:

• Real world scene with lots of shadow casting lights (different objects, different shaders, different lights, different shadow types in one scene):

  • Core Duo with Radeon X1600: 23 FPS D3D9, 13 FPS GL.

  • P4 with GeForce 6800GT: 16 FPS D3D9, 9 FPS GL.

  • Core2 Duo with Radeon HD 2600: 41 FPS D3D9, 35 FPS GL.

• High object count test (1000 objects, multiple lights, 5 passes per object total):

  • Core Duo with Radeon X1600: 18.3 FPS D3D9, 12.5 FPS GL.

  • P4 with GeForce 6800GT: 13.2 FPS D3D9, 9.4 FPS GL.

  • Core2 Duo with Radeon HD 2600: 34.8 FPS D3D9, 29.3 FPS GL.

• Dynamic geometry (lots of particle systems) test (this is limited by vertex buffer writing speed and CPU calculating the particles, not draw by calls):

  • Core Duo with Radeon X1600: 170 FPS D3D9, 102 FPS GL.

  • P4 with GeForce 6800GT: 108 FPS D3D9, 74 FPS GL.

  • Core2 Duo with Radeon HD 2600: 325 FPS D3D9, 242 FPS GL.

• …and so on.

To be fair, there are a couple of tests where on some hardware OpenGL has a slight edge. But in 95% of the cases, D3D9 is faster. Not to mention that we have about 10x less broken hardware/driver workarounds for D3D9 than we have for OpenGL…

What gives? Either our OpenGL code is horribly suboptimal, or “OpenGL is faster!!!!11oneoneeleven” is a myth. I have trouble figuring out in which places our code would be horribly suboptimal, I think we follow all advice given by hardware vendors on how to make OpenGL efficient (not that there is much advice out there though…).

There isn’t much software that can run the same content on both D3D and OpenGL and is suitable for benchmarking. I tried Ogre 3D demos on one machine (GeForce 6800GT card) and guess what? D3D9 is faster in tests that specifically stress draw count (like the instancing demo… D3D9 is faster both in instanced and non-instanced modes).

Am I crazy?

A demo with a political statement: Ultimatum to the World: First Days of the Last War by mfx.

This is good because it has a statement; and we need works that say things that matter. To quote Naomi Klein’s speech:

Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?

So respect to mfx for making a demo with a statement. We need more of those. I don’t have enough passion to say things that matter to me; maybe someday I will.

That said, the demo itself is not that good. Whereas in The Ballet Dancer the final “now that everything is lost…” was a culmination of the whole demo, here in Ultimatum to the World the famous Einstein quote does not work at all. Maybe the quote is just too well known.

In this age of the interwebs we have Lolcats, we even have LOLCODE… why can’t we have Lolshadows?

This is actually me debugging point light shadows (that happen to use depth encoded into RGBA8 cubemaps).

This is what happens when you use a too wide Poisson disc blurring in screen space and no prevention of “shadow leakage” over different depths.

LOL! Internet!