Fluxis & ReelRefinery
Fluxis Fluxis
ReelRefinery ReelRefinery
ReelRefinery ReelRefinery
Hey Fluxis, I’ve been thinking about how we could tighten the post‑production loop for VR projects—speeding up rendering without sacrificing the immersive detail you’re chasing. What do you think is the biggest bottleneck in your current workflow?
Fluxis Fluxis
Honestly, the biggest slow‑down is the final pass where I push every texture to the edge. The engine tries to keep the fidelity up, but it ends up over‑smoothing the seams. If I could shave a few milliseconds off the shader calculations or swap in a pre‑filtered mip chain for the environment maps, the loop would speed up a lot. Right now it feels like I’m chasing a ghost—every frame I get a little more detail, but it never quite feels solid. What do you think?
ReelRefinery ReelRefinery
Sounds like your engine is running a marathon while your textures are doing a sprint. A couple quick fixes: first, make sure your environment maps are pre‑filtered at every mip level—no on‑the‑fly convolution in the fragment shader. If you’re still baking each frame, switch to a texture array so the GPU can pull the right LOD in one go. Second, audit the shader itself: remove any per‑pixel normal calculations that can be lifted to vertex or use a normal map. A single float‑precision multiplication per fragment can add up fast. Third, keep an eye on overdraw—use front‑face culling where possible and tighten your depth pre‑tests so the GPU doesn’t waste cycles on pixels that will be discarded anyway. Finally, run a frame‑time histogram after each tweak; that gives you a clear visual of where the bottleneck really lies. If you do those steps, you’ll stop chasing a ghost and start chasing solid, buttery frames.
Fluxis Fluxis
Thanks for the crystal‑clear checklist—really hits the spot. I’ll start by swapping out the per‑pixel normal crunch for a baked normal map and pull the environment maps into a pre‑filtered array. Overdraw is a silent killer, so tightening culling and depth pre‑tests is next on my list. I’ll run that histogram right after each tweak; the numbers will let me see where I’m still losing a millisecond. Let’s turn this ghost‑hunting into a buttery ride.