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Performance Problems again ;)

by xardias · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 08/25/2006 (7:09 am) · 11 replies

Hi,

I just realized that I have massive performance problems with the 3.5 Milestone of TSE.
The demos (including terrain_water_demo) have been running smoothly at milestone 3.0, but after updating the motion stops in reqular intervals, about every few seconds the image freezes for a fraction of a second.
Its the same problem no mater what demo I use. The only way to get it running smoothly is removing the waterblock from the terrain_water_demo.

I am using a release build of TSE build with visual studio 2005.

and maybe you are interested in the log messages during initialization
Processor Init:
   AMD (unknown), ~1.73 Ghz
     (timed at roughly 1.74 Ghz)
   FPU detected
   MMX detected
   3DNow detected
   SSE detected

Video Init:
DirectX version - 9.00
Direct 3D device found

   Cur. D3DDevice ref count=1
   Pix version detected: 3.000000
   Vert version detected: 3.000000
Initializing GFXCardProfiler (D3D9)
   o Vendor : 'NVIDIA'
   o Card   : 'GeForce 6600 GT'
   o Version: '84.21'
   - Scanning card capabilities...
GFXCardProfiler (D3D9) - Setting capability 'autoMipMapLevel' to 1.
GFXCardProfiler (D3D9) - Setting capability 'maxTextureWidth' to 4096.
GFXCardProfiler (D3D9) - Setting capability 'maxTextureHeight' to 4096.
   - Loading card profiles...
      - Loading card profile profile/D3D9.cs
      - Loading card profile profile/D3D9.NVIDIA.cs
      - No card profile profile/D3D9.NVIDIA.GeForce6600GT.cs exists
      - No card profile profile/D3D9.NVIDIA.GeForce6600GT.8421.cs exists
Texture Manager
   - Approx. Available VRAM:  134217728
   - Threshold VRAM:  68157440
   - Quality mode: high

I hope you have any ideas on how to increase the performance.
thanks and regards
Dennis
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Torque Owner Chris Byars
Ion Productions
#1
08/25/2006 (9:42 am)
Get an Intel processor and an ATI graphics card. ;)

But seriously, everything seems to appear fine there..

Torque Owner Gary Haussmann
#2
08/25/2006 (11:09 am)
Well, I see the same thing (TSE freezes/skips a frames every few seconds) on my laptop which has Intel/ATI, so it's not that :P

Could it be old video drivers? Mine are pretty old at this point. I haven't upgraded mine since they seem to be "customized" for my laptop, thus an upgrade is not as easy as just downloading new drivers from ATI's website.

Torque Owner Chris Byars
Ion Productions
#3
08/25/2006 (11:19 am)
Could be the problem, but I've read in the TSE MS 3.5 release thread of someone with the same issue, I think. With 247 posts in that thread I don't remember where though. :)

Torque Owner Surge
MDNAMEDIA
#4
08/25/2006 (12:48 pm)
Im pretty sure I read that, its resolved for MS4, it was some tweak that needed to be done.
(wish I could find that post)

Torque Owner Bobby Leighton
Imagn' Games
#5
08/25/2006 (1:40 pm)
And i have an AMD and and ATI..I really dont think its hardware...these guys are probably right..Video drivers are probably the source of the problem...I believe i had the same problem at one point but finding a driver that worked was as simple as looking through a list, so you shouldnt have any problems finding one....ive often wondererd if some of these problems were having comes from the makers of our video cards producing a set of drivers that are supposed to work for all the cards of that chipset?Now I really dont know how those drivers really work so if somone here does then please step in and correct me....im wondering if the subdle differences between some of the cards here get diffent results when using certian drivers and trying to prgrams the GPU and reach certian functionality....hmmm interesting

Torque Owner Gary Haussmann
#6
08/25/2006 (1:54 pm)
Well, looking at the MS3.5 thread this effect is--as Chris said--already noted by several people. So it will eventually be "tweaked" by GG, if it hasn't already been tweaked.

Torque Owner OverDozing
#7
08/26/2006 (5:33 pm)
Same problem here, amd/nvidia lastest driver. fresh win install.

Torque Owner Brian Ramage
Black Jacket Games
#8
08/28/2006 (6:01 pm)
I'm guessing the problem is that it can't fit all the textures into your card's 128MB of memory. That's the problem with my 6600GT anyway. Change this in client/prefs.cs and see if it helps:


$pref::TextureManager::qualityMode = "1";
$pref::TextureManager::reductionLevel = "1";

Associate Manoel Neto
Default Studio Name
#9
08/29/2006 (6:10 am)
Do those prefs even work? I was having a similar problem (artists going "next-gen happy" on their textures), and looked at those prefs, but they didn't seem to do anything. Well, at least the code which should deal with this didn't seem to be downscaling textures anywhere.

Anyway, we solved the problem by downscaling some textures and using a mix of DXT1 and DXT5 for nearly all textures.

Torque Owner Brian Ramage
Black Jacket Games
#10
08/29/2006 (4:20 pm)
They were broken for a while, but I got them up and running again for MS 3.5.

Torque Owner Jeremiah Fulbright
#11
08/29/2006 (5:39 pm)
$pref::TextureManager::reductionLevel = "1";


That isn't even in the current codebase..

Where exactly is qualityMode hooked into the Render pipeline? I did some searching for the variables set and they all returned entries in the initial Console printing and valid texture info parts, but no other places that it is checked