Comments on: XNA BMFont Renderer, Logo and Some Screens

By: ZMan

ZMan — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:57:34 +0000

SpriteBatch isn’t batching? WOw that must be a bug in the beta or something as its certainly supposed to and I’ve not see the sort of perf issues I would expect if it wasn’t. Unless you need something very special its not worth writing your own 2d sprite stuff IMO.

By: proj

proj — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:36:42 +0000

You can run a simple frame capture experiment in PIX to see what I’m referring to. Every SpriteBatch.Draw() call that is enclosed in the begin and end will translate to an individual DrawUserPrimitive.

2D sprite stuff in DirectX is a lot easier to write than a whole slew of other 3D code. There are some nice upsides to writing your own.

When you send the sprite prims through your own shader you can use a texture atlus and of course do the submission batching yourself pretty easily.

Also there are some fun tricks you can do in image space when you send the sprite quads through your own shader code

By: ZMan

ZMan — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 03:08:58 +0000

I didn’t mean to say you were incorrect, just that its most defintly a bug if thats what you are seeing and should be reported to MS since most people won’t want to do any special stuff. Yes I’m sure you can have fun shader wise if you write your won.

By: proj

proj — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 04:54:32 +0000

I was just sorta thinking out loud. Ideally I shouldn’t right my own if the built-in stuff is good enough which it probably is for my purposes. Maybe I’m just trying to justify the time I spent on it. I’ll let the XNA team know but they might not be too interested in fixing this issue right now, I haven’t stress tested it but I bet you can use the sprite batch as-is to render thousands of sprites on marginal hardware. And that would be the ‘very special’ something you were referring to in your oringinal comment.

By: Atrix

Atrix — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 02:07:11 +0000

Well, there is still value to re-inventing the wheel even if at worst it’s worse than the wheel that exists.

That value is a more intimate knowledge of how the wheel works so you can better utilize it to it’s full potential, or make a new kind of wheel which does something nobody else has thought of yet.