- whatsnew2008.jpg (24.35 KiB) Viewed 2235 times
Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn't add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?
Before Lightsmark, realtime global illumination was limited to small scenes, small resolutions, small speeds, specially crafted scenes with handmade optimizations. Lightsmark breaks all limits at once, running in reasonably sized scene (220000 triangles) in high resolution (1680x1050) at excellent speed (100-400fps). Lighting is computed fully automatically in original unmodified scene from 2007 game World of Padman, not tweaked for Lightsmark and with all sorts of geometrical difficulties, with extra rooms hidden below floor etc.
In the new 2008 version they have made some changes:
# faster engine (up to 3x higher fps, so scores are different)
# increased realism (per-pixel indirect shadows and color bleeding)
# Linux support (was Windows only)
# native 64bit support (was 32bit only)
# all GPUs use the same render path (in 2007 they didn't due to driver bug)
# minor rendering fixes (sun's shadow, robot's back faces)
Since our benchmarking thread on 2007 did so well I figured we'd give it another shot! If everyone will take a second and download the application and run it at 1280x1024 it would be great!
Lightsmark 2008 v2.0 torrent, standard download - 28MB, Windows installer
Be sure to post up your scores as well as your system specs (CPU/GPU/Memory and OS)
