"Now, if the assumption thus far has been that surface count slowdown has been because of texture switches what would account for the slowdown in this situation? Fill rate?"
No, surfaces. Even though they're not textured differently, Blit still creates treats the surfaces as different.
The only optimizarion Mark could do is to check to see if the last surface rendered has the same properties (texture, color, alpha, shininess) as the current surface being rendered.
This may provide a large speed up in your demo, but in most games it would not provide a big speedup becuase entities can't be storted by material, they have to be sorted by distance. But there are certain cases, like particle systems, where this might provide a big speedup IF the user knows about it and what to avoid doing (like changing the color or alpha of the particles... only animating the texture) I have written to Mark aobut this, so maybe th enext version of Blitz will have something like this, but he never replies to my emails anymore so I don't know what his thoughts on this are. I wouldn't count on the opitimizaton appearing in the next update though.
No, surfaces. Even though they're not textured differently, Blit still creates treats the surfaces as different.
The only optimizarion Mark could do is to check to see if the last surface rendered has the same properties (texture, color, alpha, shininess) as the current surface being rendered.
This may provide a large speed up in your demo, but in most games it would not provide a big speedup becuase entities can't be storted by material, they have to be sorted by distance. But there are certain cases, like particle systems, where this might provide a big speedup IF the user knows about it and what to avoid doing (like changing the color or alpha of the particles... only animating the texture) I have written to Mark aobut this, so maybe th enext version of Blitz will have something like this, but he never replies to my emails anymore so I don't know what his thoughts on this are. I wouldn't count on the opitimizaton appearing in the next update though.