Best way to draw roughly 1 million lines getting reasonable FPS?

Questions & Answers
1

Hi all,

My aim is to visualize around 1 Million coloured arrows (static, not in movement) at the same time, representing different velocity vectors. The problem is that I don’t know what is the best way in terms of performance to do this.

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At the moment I’m using OPENGL lines, but when reaching 100.000 arrows, the simulation starts to be choppy. Do you know if there is any way to draw roughly 1 million lines reaching almost 40-60 fps?

PS: I’ve to say that I have a very powerful NVIDIA GTX 980, so if I could make use of CUDA or ComputeDirect capabilities…maybe doing this I would not have problems…

What do you think? Could you say me different approaches to achieve my aim?
Cheers
Thank you

2

I’m sorry but I think that 1.000.000 is too much for any game engine in these times. I suggest to use something for animations like Blender.

3

As I understand it, each line is actually a quad internally. This means you’re trying to draw 2 million triangles, and 4 million verts, every frame.

Can you simply reduce the resolution of your vector field visualization?

For example, I’m using simplex noise to generate turbulence, but I’m only taking a limited number of samples to visualize it for the user:

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