Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Particles!

Last one for today. Up to now particles have always been rendered from system memory. For 1.8.5 you'll have the option to render them from a hardware vertex buffer instead, by setting r_drawparticles 2. This might be faster than using system memory, but then again it might be slower (it is in all tests so far) so you're going to need to try it and find out for yourself.

I've left the default as system memory because it is slower in all of my tests, and at least this way I've got a default that's consistent with previous releases.

r_drawparticles 0 will completely disable all particle drawing, in case you were wondering. You'll only need this if you're looking for the ultimate in speed and you don't care about drawing particles.

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