Free performance boost!

[DarkHorror]

Well I have had some time to look through some more of AMDs GPUOpen tools and examples. There is a tool called Tootle, will increase performance for both AMD and NVidia, and you can use it right now! I did a quick test and found switching between the standard model and a model that went through tootle and found that I was getting a nice performance boost. I will be having my artists do this on their models, looking forward to seeing what sort of performance boost we get in our project.

Tootle (Triangle Order Optimization Tool) is a 3D triangle mesh optimization tool that improves on existing mesh preprocessing techniques. By using Tootle, developers can optimize their models for pixel overdraw as well as vertex cache performance. This can provide significant performance improvements in pixel limited situations, with no penalty in vertex-limited scenarios, and no runtime cost.

Check out this blog post for the release announcement.

Key Features
Vertex cache optimization: Triangles are re-ordered to optimize for the post-transform vertex cache in modern GPUs. This will yield significant performance improvements in vertex-tranform limited scenes.
Overdraw optimization: To reduce the pixel cost of rendering a mesh, the Tootle library further re-orders the triangles in the mesh to reduce pixel overdraw. Significant reductions in pixel overdraw (2x or higher) can be achieved. This can yield significant performance improvements in pixel-limited scenes, and incurs no penalty in vertex-limited scenarios.
Vertex prefetch cache optimization: Triangle indices are re-indexed in the order of their occurrence in the triangle list. The vertex buffer is re-ordered to match these new indices. Thus, vertices are accessed close to each other in memory. This optimization exploits the input vertex cache because vertices are typically fetched in a cacheline (that may contains more than one vertex data).

[pd1ds]

I’m a noob around here and interested to see what others have to say about this. It’s been around since 2006 so seems like there would be a reason why everyone isn’t using it lol