Improving SpriteBatch performance for tiles
- by Richard Rast
I realize this is a variation on what has got to be a common question, but after reading several (good answers) I'm no closer to a solution here. So here's my situation:
I'm making a 2D game which has (among some other things) a tiled world, and so, drawing this world implies drawing a jillion tiles each frame (depending on resolution: it's roughly a 64x32 tile with some transparency).
Now I want the user to be able to maximize the game (or fullscreen mode, actually, as its a bit more efficient) and instead of scaling textures (bleagh) this will just allow lots and lots of tiles to be shown at once. Which is great!
But it turns out this makes upward of 2000 tiles on the screen each time, and this is framerate-limiting (I've commented out enough other parts of the game to make sure this is the bottleneck). It gets worse if I use multiple source rectangles on the same texture (I use a tilesheet; I believe changing textures entirely makes things worse), or if you tint the tiles, or whatever.
So, the general question is this:
What are some general methods for improving the drawing of thousands of repetitive sprites?
Answers pertaining to XNA's SpriteBatch would be helpful but I'm equally happy with general theory. Also, any tricks pertaining to this situation in particular (drawing a tiled world efficiently) are also welcome.
I really do want to draw all of them, though, and I need the SpriteMode.BackToFront to be active, because
