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What affects performance of TGE ?

by Kevin Bamonte · in Torque Game Engine · 07/17/2008 (2:38 pm) · 2 replies

Hello all,

I know a pretty broad question but here's the situation :

built a mission, small terrain, but lots of .dts objects also some interior .difs - on some machines it will be very sluggish or jerky when moving about the 3d world on others very fast and smooth and on some it won't run at all

the game is pretty much the fps demo with a different mission, even the original fps demo runs very differently on these pc's

specs :
"slow" machine
AMD 2.0GHz
384mb RAM
NVideo GeForce
windows xp

"fast" machine
Intel Pentium 4 3.0ghz
512mb RAM
NVidia Quadro NVS 285
windows 2000


so again the question is, what affects speed/smoothness of moving around in a 3d world the most (not the loading) video card, system ram, system processor, opengl, D3D ? what should i be looking at here as the difference from "slow" to "fast"

also what settings in the pref.cs file will greatly affect speed when trolling around the 3d world ?

thanks in advance

kevin
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Torque Owner J.P. Berry
#1
07/17/2008 (3:08 pm)
Well, there are a lot of things to consider when evaluating performance issues.

As far as PC requirements go, having plenty of RAM and a beefy video card will net you the best performance gain. I would recommend at least a gig of memory, though 2 gigs is becoming more of a minimun requirement these days. A 3.0 ghz pc with only 512mb of RAM sounds like a bottleneck to me. Having a PCI-Express or AGP video card is your best bet, while an onboard graphics card is your worst bet.

For adjusting the system settings, lowering your game's display resolution will quickly net you some fps.

type "metrics(fps)" into your console to display your frames per second. Now, run/fly around your mission and take notes where your fps drops. You will probably notice that places where lots of dts or .difs are placed together on screen will drop your frame rates.

If you don't have any LOD's on your shapes, this will make a huge impact. For interiors, using portals will also help a lot in most cases. Lowering your viewdistance, as well as fog distance, is a sure way to increase your fps.

Hope this helps a little.

Torque Owner J.P. Berry
#2
07/17/2008 (3:14 pm)
I also forgot to mention that things like sounds emitters, precipitation, and particle emitters can greatly affect performance. Open up the Stronghold mission, and delete the sound emitters, and snow data blocks. It's a pretty drastic performance change imo.