Help: Horrible performance of TGB / TGB games since ~2 weeks ago

#1 I haven't seen anything like that in our tests and we're doing a lot of hammering on our 2D engines right now. What are your hardware specs and driver version?

#2 Phenom II X4 945
8 GB DDR3 (1600)
HD 6870 1GB VRAM (Catalyst 12.3)
X-Fi Xtreme gamer (creative driver 2.18.15)

All on a Windows 7 Professional 64bit machine.


I didn't have this issue from the start, the first time I encountered this was during the RainyDay tutorial (while I was creating the rain particle effect, which was already laggy inside the level editor). Could it be that one of the graphics driver updates was bad for my TGB?

Another thing I noticed: TGB now takes slightly more time until it displays the create/open a project dialog during startup.

#3 90% of the time, this issue is due to some kind of driver update. Someone at our office encountered the issue recently when they updated their mouse and keyboard drivers.

#4 Thanks for the information.
Sounds like the only thing I can do about it is to re-install TGB? Or is there any other known solution (as this is not the most comfortable one...)?

As long as I have TGB installed on not more than 2 PCs at the same time re-installing should be no problem right?

#5 Reinstalling TGB wouldn't really change anything. You can try deleting all cached data for the engine, though. No idea where it hides on Windows, but compiled scripts are stored somewhere in your private data. These can occasionally cause trouble with different versions (your modifications count too). If that doesn't help check what else is broken.

#6 I'm having the same problems Martin is having. The only similarly between our systems is that we both have AMD cards (my is a 5870) with catalyst version 12.3. Before the driver update I didn't have any problems.

EDIT: I just rolled back to 12.1 (which is surprisingly hard with AMD, as you can't use the device manger to roll back) and can confirm that it is the 12.3 catalyst update that was the problem.

#7 Ah thank you very much! I still had the 11.12 installer on my PC, and with this one everything works fine.

Let's hope that future versions of the AMD driver work again with TGB...

#8 They'll fix it when they discover something else breaks ;)

Most likely it's the OpenGL drivers which have been broken in that version of Catalyst.

#9 It's me again.
Due to some graphical problems I had to upgrade to the latest version of the AMD driver again (this time 12.4), but the problem is still present (even in iTorque 2D). I really can't work with the older driver versions, but developing with this performance is really a pain in the a**... is there nothing that can be done about it? As not only the editor but also the games are lagging, this is really a killer for T2D on my PC. :(

#10 It is solvable :).
One solution is to use ProcessLasso and force TGB to use both cores. That is one way. But when you launch the game it will still lag until you force that one to multicore too.

I solved it this way:
Go to your games directory, search for the defaultPrefs.cs in common/preferences.
Look for Line 98. There is a switch with different vendors.
Somehow Torque is unable on my pc to detect my graphics card as ATI, so it uses VEN_0000 and DEV_0000. I just cranked that into the switch statement:

switch$( $PCI_VEN )
{
   case "VEN_0000":
       $pref::Video::displayDevice = "D3D";
	   $pref::Video::allowOpenGL = 0;

This makes it use D3D when it is running on my pc or cannot detect the graphics cards for some reason. But I think one should not have that in the final version that is delivered to customers, I don't know. I am pretty new to Torque2D.
It is really not optimal, but a workaround.
I know from a developer where I bought a game from that he changed something in the c++ code and changed some rendering and that actually solved the problem. I did not dare to ask what he changed though and I don't know if it is specific to their game or not. And I don't have Source access yet, need to wait for the next paycheck :D.

http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=22032#p22032

#11 Ah great, you're a genius! :)

I took a look at the forum you postet, and it looks like AMD knows about this issue. Anyway, version 12.3 did not get it right yet, let's hope the best for 12.4.

#12 That empty $PCI_VEN thing just keeps humming along... and you WILL need to know the vendor and device ID of the graphics chip.

Here's the fix for that, if you're interested:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/76723

also:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/120385

For if you have any trouble compiling it.

-Tim

#13 Thanks Tim for the heads up. I did not had source access when I posted that.