Changelog:
*** Vendetta 1.8.320/.1
- Preliminary dynamic lights have been added to the docking and
launch bays.
- Fixed the glow effect so it isn't so over-bright.
- Shadowmap cascade levels are consolidated into 1 texture atlas
instead of 4 separate textures.
- Tweaked the shadow cascade transition to be more subtle.
- Tweaked render state changes in the DirectX 11 driver.
- Ice asteroids and solar panels now receive shadows.

hey devs, the dx11 shaders look great, nice work

For some reason, the last update seems to have made the game become very choppy for me if I select the new driver. I have a relatively old machine but it was doing ok until this update, but it could just be that it can't handle the new lighting effects. With the reference driver it still works fine.

(some of my hardware details: https://gist.github.com/vanatteveldt/4f6b455555ce4c3a2ce1)

vanatteveldt: That's interesting. It should actually be faster on average, as the texture atlas for shadow maps requires a lot less render-target changes, resulting in about a 20% speedup on certain Intel integrated GPUs.

That being said, your card is pretty old, as you say (2007: the 9800GT being identical to an 8800GT with a different die process size, and more ram). We're aiming for more of a DX10.1 feature set, where things like 4XAA render targets are "free" from a framerate standpoint, but they might not be on your card (DX10.0). Or, the techniques we're using may be optimal on newer chips, but overwhelm the memory bus on an older chip and be less cache-efficient.

Anyway, you can try disabling shadows with "/set rdoshadows 0" and see if that helps. Otherwise it may be something else in the render pipeline.

You can also try (separately, with shadows enabled) disabling the Z-buffer pre-pass with "/set rdozprepass 0". We're probably going to turn that off in the future, it's an experimental enhancement that only improves certain GPU architectures, and like all our experimental stuff.. we're still collecting data.

We are still continuing to evolve the engine, algorithms and techniques are changing considerably from version to version, so continue to keep an eye on it. Let us know if any of the above stuff helps.

Thanks for the reply. I am aware that my box is pretty old, I don't expect nifty graphics (but I like 'em when they work :)). The reason for the report was that it seemed to be a regression from the previous version. I'll try with the commands and report back!

Edit: Am I doing something wrong? I launch from the station, go to the console, and type /set rdoshadows 0, it says: variabel rdoshadows not found, same for rdozprepass and rdoprepass.

Another thing: previous time with dynamic lighting on, all stations became sem-transparant. I could see the advertisements on the other side of the station shining through, and could see the countours of the station from within the docking bay. I saved a screenshot to /tmp, but that got lost in a reboot and I can't reproduce... (there were also no lighting effects, and the slowness was gone btw, and now that the lighting effects are normal it is also choppy again)

Final edit (I hope :)): There is also an interface bug: if I set lighting to "on" or "high quality", and I go back to the menu, it is listed as Off even though the effect is still obviously on, so I cannot change it back using the menu. Also, if I switch drivers, it kicks me back to low resolution, but without changing the interface size, so the menu is only half visible until I press escape and the enter the menu again.

(the high quality lighting is really pretty btw! I need to get me a new GPU...)