The idea of progressive rendering was to distribute the load on all timesteps,
to keep the game as smooth as possible. This was a major concern when
scheduling things to do (gradient computation, ...) in Nuage's code.
If the rendering is not progressive, it is normal to observe a small speed-up
because same area of memory is less fragmentally accessed. But speed is often
less important than smoothness from a player point of view.
Have a nice day,
Steph
--
http://stephane.magnenat.net
True, smoothness is more important. The new system still uses progressive updating to keep CPU usage down. It works, and you can't really notice accept for the grey scan line that is drawn (I almost just removed it). In a more sophisticated game engine, things like Minimap updates can be done only on ticks that have leftover CPU cycles, because they don't need to the sychronized. This would further add to smoothness, evne on low-end computers.