Most importantly, the separate command line options for switching on the legacy buffer handling have been removed.
There's really no need for them anymore, because unlike in earlier versions many of the implementation differences no longer exist - with the exception of where the light and vertex buffer contents are generated.
For testing this, -glversion 3 is sufficient.
To reduce the performance impact, legacy mode will now always create flat vertex data on the fly instead of relying on the vertex buffer. This makes the CVAR mostly redundant as on anything more modern rendering per subsector will always be slower.
These files are not part of the actual renderer but part of the system code.
This means, for separated modern and legacy GL renderers, there still will only be one set of this, unlike everything else.
- with renderers freely switchable, some shortcuts in the 3D floor code had to be removed, because now the hardware renderer can get FF_THISINSIDE-flagged 3D floors.
- changed handling of attenuated lights in the legacy renderer to be adjusted when being rendered instead of when being spawned. For the software renderer the light needs to retain its original values.
This was done to clean up the license and to ensure that any commercial fork of the engine has to obey the far stricter requirements concerning source distribution. The old license was compatible with GPLv2 whereas combining GPLv2 and LGPLv3 force a license upgrade to GPLv3. The license of code that originates from ZDoomGL has not been changed.
After doing some profiling it was very obvious that this has better performance than client arrays. Persistent buffers are still better, though, especially for handling dynamic lights.
That's again one less write access to the buffer. The uniform method was chosen because this way a buffer update can be completely avoided, and setting a single uniform is a lot cheaper and simpler to handle.
This eliminates most behavioral differences for FFlatVertexBuffer between both operating modes, now the only difference is where the buffer is located.
There was one issue preventing the previous 2.0 betas from running under GL 3.x: The lack of persistently mapped buffers.
For the dynamic light buffer today's changes take care of that problem.
For the vertex buffer there is no good workaround but we can use immediate mode render calls instead which have been reinstated.
To handle the current setup, the engine first tries to get a core profile context and checks for presence of GL 4.4 or the GL_ARB_buffer_storage extension.
If this fails the context is deleted again and a compatibility context retrieved which is then used for 'old style' rendering which does work on older GL versions.
This new version does not support GL 3.2 or lower, meaning that Intel GMA 3000 or lower is not supported. The reason for this is that the engine uses a few GL 3.3 features which are not present in the latest Intel driver.
In general the Intel GMA 3000 is far too weak, though, to run the demanding shader of GZDoom 2.x, so this is no real loss. Performance would be far from satisfying.
A command line option '-gl3' exists to force the fallback render path. On my Geforce 550Ti there's approx. 10% performance loss on this path.
Sadly, anything else makes no sense.
All the recently made changes live or die, depending on this extension's presence.
Without it, there are major performance issues with the buffer uploads. All of the traditional buffer upload methods are without exception horrendously slow, especially in the context of a Doom engine where frequent small updates are required.
It could be solved with a complete restructuring of the engine, of course, but that's hardly worth the effort, considering it's only for legacy hardware whose market share will inevitably shrink considerably over the next years.
And even then, under the best circumstances I'd still get the same performance as the old immediate mode renderer in GZDoom 1.x and still couldn't implement the additions I'd like to make.
So, since I need to keep GZDoom 1.x around anyway for older GL 2.x hardware, it may as well serve for 3.x hardware, too. It's certainly less work than constantly trying to find workarounds for the older hardware's limitations that cost more time than working on future-proofing the engine.
This new, trimmed down 4.x renderer runs on a core profile configuration and uses persistently mapped buffers for nearly everything that is getting transferred to the GPU. (The global uniforms are still being used as such but they'll be phased out after the first beta release.
