[sldev] branches/shadow-draft missing llrender.cpp

[Kitty]

> Has anyone really verified that going back to the basic rendering 
> without all the fancy shaders is now worse performance than 
> pre-Windlight? I'm kind of curious now.

My sense through general use was always that WindLight was give-or-take 1/3rd slower than pre-WindLight on my puter with an older card (I bought a 5200FX about a year ago and bought a 6200 about 2-3 months ago since any 7xxx were all in excess of 100€ which is just more than I'm willing to spend on a video card).

Neither can handle atmospheric shaders, but both still experience a noticeable drop in fps between pre-WindLight viewers and WindLight viewers.

I just tried again to get actual numbers: the methodology was to set WindLight to the exact same settings as the pre-WindLight one (and atmospheric shaders turned off obviously) and log on with one viewer, find a spot without any avies to make sure the comparison holds between viewer sessions, log off and then to log both viewers on in the exact spot I logged off and wait however long it takes for the bandwidth slider to settle down to 0kpbs. That should mean that both are rendering the exact same scene since I don't move the camera at all after logging on.

#1 - inside my house
Pre-WL: 21.7
WL: 14.9

#2 - outside of my house
Pre-WL: 15.9
WL: 12.2

#3 - Biloxi (in front of what I would dub the "water temple")
Pre-WL: 16.6
WL: 9.8 (I tested this one 3 times just to make sure)

#4 - Botanical (in the forest, looking at a tent)
Pre-WL: 13.1
WL: 8.0

#5 - Relic (looking out on all of the sim)
Pre-WL: 12.5
WL: 10.6

(The last one was at Bad Girls, 24 avies in view according to Render Info. WindLight did get Avatar Imposters turned on here)

#6 - Bad Girl (at the edge of the stage, looking into the crowd from a distance)
Pre-WL: 5.7 - 6.1
WL: 6.5 - 6.8

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If I spent all my time in highly crowded places I guess I would have seen an improvement as long as I could live with imposters, but since I personally tend to stick to small groups or wander around the grid on my own I did experience a noticeable difference before I gave in and just bought a new puter to play SL at a decent fps (if WL hadn't come along, I wouldn't have since I was quite happy with the FPS I did get and I don't particularly care about the new sky).

(Test puter: WinXP / 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 / GeForce 6200 128Mb)