Sundog Software has released SilverLining Sky, 3D Cloud and Weather SDK version 5.064.
It includes some performance improvements for customers using our OpenGL 3.2 renderer. Precipitation effects, including rain, sleet, snow and mixed precipitation, now render over twice as fast as before.
We have found a way to apply GPU instancing to our precipitation particles and move culling of the particles to the rasteriser. This frees up the CPU, while precipitation is present in your scene. In our own benchmarks, a stormy scene with heavy rain went from 250 frames per second (FPS) to over 500 FPS.
To benefit from the improvements, a customer has to use SilverLining’s OpenGL 3.2 renderer specified by passing the OPENGL32CORE parameter into SilverLining::Atmosphere::Initialize().
Customers using the older OPENGL renderer may want to consider upgrading to take advantage of this and future improvements that rely on more recent OpenGL capabilities.
SilverLining produces accurate skies for any given time and location, fast and automatically. The service offers real atmospheric scattering simulation, ephemeris model for accurate sun and moon, crepuscular rays (‘God Rays’), accurate stars and planets at night, dynamic time of day effects and high-altitude effects and atmospheric limb from space.
For more information, fill out the enquiry form on this page.