I was looking at the specs of a new generation engine like the Stalker engine:
http://stalker-game.com/index_eng.html
Some of the specs are quite impressive. It clames, for instance “~300 000 polygons per frame at 60 fps on average hardware”.
How close can jogl aproach this performance ?
In theory using the same optimizations jogl can come close, to the speed of most C++ applications (only falling short where jogl lacks support for something that might be needed). The stalker engine is a directx based engine, not opengl, so you are probably going to be comparing the directx features to opengl features more than anything else.
OK so is there any easy to use demo that can show benchmarks of jogl ? Nothing too fancy or complicated to install, just something that shows a frame count and the number of polygons being rendered. Preferable something that let us configure several screen modes and full-screen/window mode.
The Grand Canyon demo (Google for JCanyon or Grand Canyon demo) shows off high polygon throughput pretty well. The version on the web currently uses GL4Java, but a JOGL version should be up soon.
Well… my pretty much unoptimized engine rendering outdoor terrain is doing around 500k triangles per frame with fairly complex multi-texture fragment shaders (dynamic lighting, multiple texture scales, fog, etc). This is 500k triangles actually sent to the graphics card. i.e., after culling (in fact, very little culling happens right now, which is why I’m sending so many triangles).
I’m getting 35-40 frames/second on a dual 2GHz Mac G5 with an ATI Radeon 9700.
This is using LWJGL, so it isn’t directly comparable to JOGL, but it should be similar since both are thin interfaces on native OpenGL calls.
The things you do to get high performance rendering in C/C++ with OpenGL or DirectX are pretty much the same things you do in Java with LWJGL or JOGL. Things like using VBOs, display lists, optimized geometry like triangle strips, minimizing OpenGL state changes, etc. are far more important than whether the driving code is in C++ or in Java.
Thats cool. Lets hope that a jogl version of jCanyon can get even better performances. Still i dont expect a java engine to have the same performance as the Stalker engine but if it gets 70%-80% close it is very good. Less than that would be dangerous.
The JOGL version of the JCanyon demo gets the same performance as the GL4Java version. Both libraries are fairly thin wrappers on top of native OpenGL.
An excellent proof of Java’s speed for games is Bytonic Software’s Jake2, a port of the Quake II engine to Java. It is available at http://www.bytonic.de/ . This port runs at better than 85% of the speed of the same C code.