I have an older Dell Inspiron laptop that’s been part of my life since 2007. One of my soft goals is for voxeling to run reasonably well on it, though things aren’t looking good at the moment. The simple voxeljs demos tend to run around 30fps but within my world I’m getting between 8 and 20fps. Not good. I blame the many many more voxels present in my world. I’m considering converting the engine to StackGL/WebGL (kinda like voxel-engine-stackgl), but more on that in a future post.
Using Chrome’s profiling tools I found a loop that needed to be optimized, but that didn’t affect the frame rate. Given that my laptop runs great with only 1 chunk of voxels on-screen, I’m starting to think I’m pushing up against the limits of the laptop’s graphics card. Once it draws the next ring of chunks, the frame rate crashes down to ~10fps. Perhaps I’m exhausting the GPU’s memory, or perhaps it’s too slow to render 27 chunks of voxels. I’m not quite sure, but I’ll keep poking at it.