Me and a friend has been developing a 3D engine over the last few months. Mostly on windows, but tesing on OSX and Linux once in a while. On the PC everything works fine. The game runs quite fine on old hardware like a radeon 9000.
Running on OSX (800 MHz iBook, radeon 9200) is another matter: it runs so slow. Just above 1 fps for a scene that would hit over 50 on my friends PC laptop with comparable spec.
I recently moved all rendering from vertex arrays to VBO:s thinking it would help, but no. It seems like all (over 76%) time in the app is spent inside ATIRadeon8500::submit_buffer (profiled with shark). So it seems like we are GPU-limited. Any tips on what I can do? Other opengl apps like Quake3 runs fine.
Are you using CGL ? AGL ? GLUT ? NSOpenGL ?
Are you calling glFlush or glFinish ? Thoses must be avoided ?
Are you running the correct renderer (check GL_RENDERER) ? etc…
No, I only have 10.4.2. Stencil should be accelerated, but running without the stencil render code (a single room in the scene in my case) makes the program fast again. It surly looks lika stencil related problem.
Yes, probably. But stencil works fine, even on my Geforce4MX on MacOSX (with shadows program and stencil mirroring). Try also on a more recent hardware (Like Radeon 9800 or something). See if it helps.