I just got my looking glass! All the demos are really slow on my 2018 macbook air (ofc), except Voxatron. It runs full speed, awesome performance. It's really fun to play!!!

I want to write my own games for the looking glass. If I use the unity sdk, I'm afraid everything will be too slow. Is voxatron fast because it uses the c api and no unity?

Voxatron is fast because it's very lightweight compared to what other demos are doing.

The minimum video card spec for Looking Glass is a GTX 1060, which is a beefy card. The reason for this minimum spec is that it has to render 45 simultaneous views of whatever you are seeing, and then it also has to stitch them all together into a single image to be displayed on the Looking Glass display panel.

Most of the Unity demo scenes are not very lightweight because they are targeting that minimum spec of a GTX 1060.

Hope that helps!

Yep thanks! Looking glass is a lot more fun on a laptop, easier to show friends, bring around. I’m sure I can find some performance tricks online.

I feel like a lot of Unity games run slower than they need to, but I don't know if it's because there is some inherent overhead in Unity's implementation (it needs to solve things in a very general way after all), or just perhaps Unity developers tend to have more powerful machines and tend to favor higher minimum specs over extra development time (fair enough :> ).

In any case, Voxatron is certainly doing much less work than a typical game. To add to @MBoffin's point -- because every frame the scene needs to be rendered 45 times (actually 64 in Voxatron's case), the cost per view render can add up very quickly. Fortunately in Voxatron's case most of the work can be done once up front. The lighting calculations happen just once in software and are burnt into a big blob of outgoing vertex data that is rendered in a single glDrawArrays(). There's no texture switching, or lighting calculations inside fragment shaders, or any of the things that normally account for most gpu cost, as far as I can tell.