itch.io

Hi, sorry for bothering you.

Not at all.

I'm curious how many sprites you can realistically push in a single hblank.

Right now the limit is 58 sprites per scanline, but I think I could increase it a bit more (I don't need to do it for now).

Is there a big difference the sprites are copied from IWRAM vs EWRAM for example?

HDMA sprite buffers take more than 150KB, so I can't put them in IWRAM :)

What's the limit from your testing (I assume you have fine-tuned this limit to push the graphics of your newest racing sim).

Right now the limiting factor is CPU usage, not the number of sprites per scanline.

Also, do you always push the same amount of scanlines each hblank or do you use interrupts to fine-tune the amount depending on the geometry on screen?

Unlike with Varooom 3D, with this engine I'm firing a DMA interrupt after each HDMA transfer to setup the number of sprites to transfer per scanline.

The green dots in these pictures show how much time the CPU waits for HDMA transfers before and after using the DMA interrupt: