01-24-2017, 04:35 PM
This sounds like a very interesting challenge :)
I started working on adding support for rendering many individual pixels in DXEngine. I am also curious how many pixels can be shown.
So, if I understand you correctly, you have 250 million 3D positions and each probably have its own value that will be converted into appropriate pixel color. And you would like to show the positions as 2x2 (or 1x1) pixels. Please provide some additional details so I could better prepare a demo for you.
By the way, if you would like to show 3D lines, you can already render many (millions) of 3D lines. You can check that with using PolyLinesSample that comes with DXEngine samples project. To make the ultimate performance, uncheck the "Use geometry shader" and "Antialiased 3D lines" CheckBoxes. Also notice that performance is much better when you render a few Polylines with many lines then when rendering many Polylines with a few lines - each Polyline creates its own Draw call - the goal is to minimize the number of Draw calls.
My tests show that if you have a very good graphics card, you can render many millions of 3D lines. But at some point the performance drops from very good to very bad - I guess that this happens when graphics card runs out of its memory and the data needs paged to the main CPU memory. So I assume that for rendering huge amount of 3D lines, you need a graphics card with a lot of fast memory.
I will write more when I will have some results with rendering pixels.
I started working on adding support for rendering many individual pixels in DXEngine. I am also curious how many pixels can be shown.
So, if I understand you correctly, you have 250 million 3D positions and each probably have its own value that will be converted into appropriate pixel color. And you would like to show the positions as 2x2 (or 1x1) pixels. Please provide some additional details so I could better prepare a demo for you.
By the way, if you would like to show 3D lines, you can already render many (millions) of 3D lines. You can check that with using PolyLinesSample that comes with DXEngine samples project. To make the ultimate performance, uncheck the "Use geometry shader" and "Antialiased 3D lines" CheckBoxes. Also notice that performance is much better when you render a few Polylines with many lines then when rendering many Polylines with a few lines - each Polyline creates its own Draw call - the goal is to minimize the number of Draw calls.
My tests show that if you have a very good graphics card, you can render many millions of 3D lines. But at some point the performance drops from very good to very bad - I guess that this happens when graphics card runs out of its memory and the data needs paged to the main CPU memory. So I assume that for rendering huge amount of 3D lines, you need a graphics card with a lot of fast memory.
I will write more when I will have some results with rendering pixels.
Andrej Benedik