Performance on General Use Laptops

[Th3Punslinger]

Hi There,

I am working on developing a game intended for use on low end laptops (https://www.stonegroup.co.uk/stone-produ...-business/)- something you'd typically find in Universities, colleges etc. I understand fluid simulation is intensive, but how optimised can Obi Fluid be? 

An example of the type of project I am looking to make involves pouring liquid A from one container to another containing another liquid B, possibly making use of the "chemical reaction" aspect and changing the resulting liquid to a mixture AB: changing colour, viscosity etc.. 
Is this something that is possible on lower end hard ware in a 3D environment, or is the chemical reaction something that is mainly possible in the 2.5D style plane shown in the demo video as it would be quite intensive?

Just checking as I have limited funds for the project.

[josemendez]

Hi there!

Performance depends a lot on the settings used, mainly fluid resolution (which dictates amount of particles per volume unit) and substeps (temporal resolution of the simulation).

Things like collision detection complexity, timestep length, smoothing radius, etc can also affect performance, sometimes to a great extent. Rendering can also be a bottleneck on specific GPU architectures. It's very hard to say whether your use case would work on specific hardware without more details.

You have an in-depth performance analysis available on our webpage, it might be useful:
http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/performance.html

Is this something that is possible on lower end hard ware in a 3D environment, or is the chemical reaction something that is mainly possible in the 2.5D

Chemical reactions and diffusion are mostly free in terms of performance. They're one of the cheapest features, since it uses data that's readily computed for the basic simulation: particle neighborhoods/density.

Pressure projection is by far the most expensive part of the simulation, since it involves finding all neighbors for each particle, calculating local density, and repositioning particles to keep density constant.