How does CEGUI affect performance/framerate?

[toysnob]

Is there any considerable effect on framerate or performance when using CEGUI with DX9 or OGL applications? I am hoping if there is it is negligble?

[CrazyEddie]

It depends what you're displaying. If you have a whole load of frame windows, each containing dozens of widgets, and you start resizing those you're going to get a major hit. If you're doing a few simple game menus / config screens, you should have no problems.

I um under no illusion that there are areas where performance could be improved. Though as I always say, it's not a priority for me at the moment. Before I even start to think about performance, I have to get a certain feature point implemented (Falagard), then I'll be able to see where performance tuning is required.

CE.

[Falagard]

CE,

You're still referring to that feature by my name? Well, I'm honored.

I just thought I'd let you know that I check here often, and have been using your GUI with Ogre for several months now. I haven't done a lot with it so far, besides a startup menu and options screen, but I guarantee I will be using tons of GUI screens because I'm making a MMORPG that will require chat, inventory, player stats, settings, spells, skills, etc. as gui windows.

To answer toysnob, I think that CEGUI can handle just about anything that you throw at it. Even in my case, the user won't have all of those dialogs up at the same time, but feel free to use CEGUI and see how many windows you can open up at once.

Falagard

[CrazyEddie]

Falagard wrote:
You're still referring to that feature by my name? Well, I'm honored.

Of course

Maybe it should be referred to as - 'The new data-driven widget set, codename "Falagard".' hehe

CE.

[sfb]

We had a considerable framerate hit when we first started developing our driver. We took quads as they were sent to us and rendered them to the screen. When, like CE says, you resized or moved a window it would re-queue and re-draw the screen. We were seeing sometimes as much as a 50% hit.

Turns out this was very little to the fault of CEGUI. We changed our queueing and rendering mechanism to batch out quads based upon their sorted materials. This reduced movement framerate impact to between 1 and 5%

As a note for comparison: these tests were done using demo 7's layout. The short answer is the impact is as much or as little as you make it. We're focusing on minimal windows to avoid distracting the player from the live action of the game. This reduces the impact using CEGUI even further.