Since rendering is asynchronous, the camera texture scene may not be finished once the main scene's lights get filled in. Unfortunately forcing a synchronization with glFinisg has bad side effects on performance the only remaining option is to use separate parts of the buffer for both scenes, which in extreme cases may increase the light buffer's size - but on modern hardware that shouldn't be a problem.
- avoid rebinding the same texture multiple times, as there's considerable overhead in the texture manager.
- check gl_sort_textures only once per scene, not per draw list.
- use sampler objects to avoid creating up to 4 different system textures for one game texture just because of different clamping settings.
- avoids flushing all textures for change of texture filter mode.
- separate sprite and regular dimensions on the material level to have better control over which one gets used. It's now an explicit parameter of ValidateTexture. The main reason for this change is better handling of wall sprites which may not be subjected to such handling.
- create mipmaps based on use case, not texture type.
- allows removal of FCloneTexture hack for proper sharing of the same sprite for decals and other purposes.
- better precaching of skyboxes.
GLEW has two major problems:
- it always includes everything, there is no way to restrict the header to a specific GL version
- it is mostly broken with a core profile and only works if all sanity checks get switched off.
There was one issue preventing the previous 2.0 betas from running under GL 3.x: The lack of persistently mapped buffers.
For the dynamic light buffer today's changes take care of that problem.
For the vertex buffer there is no good workaround but we can use immediate mode render calls instead which have been reinstated.
To handle the current setup, the engine first tries to get a core profile context and checks for presence of GL 4.4 or the GL_ARB_buffer_storage extension.
If this fails the context is deleted again and a compatibility context retrieved which is then used for 'old style' rendering which does work on older GL versions.
This new version does not support GL 3.2 or lower, meaning that Intel GMA 3000 or lower is not supported. The reason for this is that the engine uses a few GL 3.3 features which are not present in the latest Intel driver.
In general the Intel GMA 3000 is far too weak, though, to run the demanding shader of GZDoom 2.x, so this is no real loss. Performance would be far from satisfying.
A command line option '-gl3' exists to force the fallback render path. On my Geforce 550Ti there's approx. 10% performance loss on this path.
- added a light preprocessing pass to the renderer so that a non-persistent buffer can be used with minimal mapping/unmapping. This only gets used if necessary because it adds some overhead to the renderer.
