Comparing Vulkan and OpenGL Software Rendering in Thrive (No GPU)

[HyperbolicHadron]

@hhyyrylainen

Anyway I think if something is changed for the benchmark it would be that it just doesn’t give a score if your computer cannot hit 60 FPS at all. And instead has text saying that you need to change the performance settings or not have a good time in Thrive.

The benchmark is not meant for low end systems anyway, as you can immediately tell with them when starting the game that the performance is kind of bad. And gets worse very quickly.

My Surface Pro 3 has very similar specs to this system that a community member uses (from Oldest Computer That You Have Run Thrive On - #20 by Oncpapa):

@Oncpapa

The oldest computer I’ve run the game on would be my main PC, which is a pre-built from 2013, it has an Intel i3-4160 CPU with 2 cores running at up to 3.60 Gigahertz, integrated graphics (Intel 4400), and 8 Gigabytes of RAM. It runs Windows 10.
The game runs at acceptable frame rate most of the time (though I don’t have a frame counter up), with some slowdown when there’s a lot on screen, though it has extremely long load times entering the editor for auto-evo (Greater than 3 minutes towards the end of the game).

I think Thrive is playable on my Surface Pro 3, and it seems like Oncpapa thinks so as well for his similar system. But the benchmark doesn’t give a benchmark value for the “Spawns until no 60 FPS” test even with settings lowered to a reasonable amount that gives a good experience in game. Maybe it doesn’t really matter too much for this one specific benchmark, as the rest of the benchmark still gives enough useful data. But I think we should still support systems like these, and if we edit the benchmarks in the future or add new ones (like 3D performance benchmarks) we should keep this in mind.

One of my goals is to get a really solid report of minimum and recommended specs for Thrive for the 1.0 release. I am testing some silly setups along the way like the software rendering mode, but that is more for the fun of seeing how far the boundaries can be pushed. So far, it looks like the minimum spec systems are still capable of running a playable Thrive game, and is even better than before with the resolution scaling options.

@hhyyrylainen

@HyperbolicHadron

I have noticed that the damage effect tanks the fps when active, might look into that. I would disable on screen damage effect setting if I was playing this more.

It’s a fullscreen overlay so it causes an extra render pass. Fullscreen passes are always expensive so if we could combine multiple of our fullscreen effect shaders into one, that would increase performance. Though with an actual GPU this seems pretty minor which is why I haven’t considered spending the effort on this.

I have noticed this performance issue in OpenGL rendering modes for typical minimum spec systems with a normal gpu before, like the aforementioned Surface Pro 3, but it has just showed up as a slight hitching on those systems. Probably isn’t worth fixing for now.