Combined Voxel Rendering

I’m still working on improving the performance of my voxel (cube) rendering engine. This week I started combining adjacent cube faces into the same triangles. This image has the combined cubes painted white. Not bad results for a quick change.

Surprisingly this change made the frame rate drop! It took a second to realize that my engine is set to always render a specific number of triangles. It’s now drawing more of the landscape since the same number of triangles now represent more voxels.

I did run into a new issue though. I’ve been using a texture map to draw the surfaces of my cubes. Now that the cubes are stretched, I’ll have to use a texture array so their surface textures can repeat instead of skew.