It surprised me too, but it makes sense:AssumedPseudonym wrote: I never would have guessed that star glow, of all things, was such a resource hog. Neat.
Speaking for myself and my own decidedly underpowered setup, there is a noticeable drop in performance when I’m on the map, even when I’m not in a binary system. I haven’t run into a binary system in quite a while, but I do remember it being considerably worse than usual. It’s still generally playable, but if there are eleventeen kerzillionty Ferians in a binary system, I have to have pretty much nothing but Transcendence running for more than a brief check of the map to keep everything from lagging to unplayability.
At 30 frames per second, we need to paint in 33 milliseconds to avoid lag. The glow can sometimes be 1,200 pixels across, totaling more than a million individual pixels. That means each pixel must paint in less than 33 nanoseconds to avoid lag (and that's assuming that nothing else is taking up time).
A 2 GHz processor takes 0.5 nanoseconds per instruction. That means we only get ~60 instructions for each pixel (often less because some instructions, like division and multiplication, take more than one cycle). Painting a glow pixel involves both blending the color with the background AND computing the strength of the glow at a given position (which means multiplication and division).
Now imagine doing that for TWO suns.
