Windlight performance; was: [sldev] branches/shadow-draft missing llrender.cpp

[Eric M. Tulla (BigPapi Linden)]

Kitty wrote:
> I used two different viewers:
> * 1.19.0.4 uses the old renderer (dubbed "pre-WindLight")
> * 1.19.1.4 incorporates WindLight (but tested with the new atmospheric
> shaders turned off)
>
> I didn't use the default settings for each because the older viewer has
> higher defaults than WindLight does. 
>   
Not true actually.  A WL viewer with basic shaders turned on (but no
atmospheric shaders) is still doing A LOT more than the old viewer at
it's highest settings.
> In my personal opinion a fair comparison is how the two compare using the
> same settings I've been using for the past two years, not running the old
> viewer at medium settings and the WindLight one at the lowest possible
> settings.
>   
Old viewer at medium and new viewer at low is still probably the closest
actual comparison in terms of what the renderer is actually doing.  Too
much has changed for this to be clearcut, but once you get beyond the
lowest settings in the new viewer, you will already be doing a lot more
rendering intensive things than in the old viewer (*glow* and new water
for example).
> So it's really a practical comparison of the older renderer vs the WindLight
> one with the new atmospheric shaders disabled I guess, not a "how low can
> you go" comparison.
>   
Unfortunately, since you were rendering new water (complex shader and
double rendering) and glow (complex screen-space effect) when you last
benchmarked the two against each other, the fps stats were biased way
down against the WL viewer.