Delay in performance.

#1 I can't help with this but I have no delays on mine. The only time I have a delay is if I load a mission that is really intensive on my system and then I have very low fps and many delays.

#2 @Jason

Sounds like your game is extremely fillrate bound. Type:

metrics( fps )

... in the console and see what your frame rate is. Also check to see if you make your game window smaller if the framerate goes up... that is a clear sign of being fillrate bound.

Also what is your video card?

#3 My video card is a GeForce 7100.

I am new to T3D and do not know how to open up the console or change teh size of the game window. I noticed the delay when using the FPS Example that came with the T3D download.

Jason

#4 hit the ` key to open the console. In options before you load a level you can select full screen or not full screen. Or you can drag the screen like a normal window in windows to change the size.

#5 @ Jason

Depending on keyboard layout, UK or US
Press @(UK) or ~(US) will bring up the console window.
You can change the window size the same way as any other windows application. Move cursor to bottom corner, click and drag. Click on resize button or alt + Enter fo chnage between full screen.

Regards
Stacy

#6 To bring up the console hit the tilde key... ~ ... on your keyboard. Its usually located above the Tab and to the left of the 1. You can then type in commands and press Enter to submit them.

The GF 7100 is a fairly old card with very low fillrate. Take a look at the stats on the NVidia site. Most cheap cards today do 10x or more fillrate and memory bandwidth. If you plan to do development seriously its worth the effort to invest in a better card for productivity's sake.

I would go into the Options screen and bring the Lighting Quality down to low for your machine at the moment. This enables the Basic Lighting mode which disables shadows and more advanced features but is better suited for the performance of your video card.

This should bring your framerate back up to acceptable levels.

#7 Thanks very much to everyone for their input.

Metrics(fps) says 6.2 max: 343.5 min: 3.0 mspf: 161.29.

Making the window size smaller did seem to speed the game up a little but it did not have a tremendous affect.

I went into the Options screen but could not figure out how to turn the Lighting Quality down to low. There were a lot of check boxes and while I did experiment and click on some of them nothing seemed to help.

Could someone recommend a few good cheap graphics cards that are better then the one I have? I currently consider myself to be a hobbyist developer but I definitely like developing and plan on doing more of it in the future so I want a good graphics card.

Thanks again for the responses. They are greatly appreciated.

Jason

#8 Better than a 7100? errr ... anything ... okay that wasn't helpful. Try to get something better than a 8400 if you afford it. (I'm using a Galaxy GTS 250 which I think is a glorified 9800 --- but I got given this)

On 1.1beta, if you go into core/scripts/client/defaults.cs you can get all the niceness of Advanced Lighting without the pressure of forward rendering if you disable the shadows. Find "new SimGroup( LightingQualityGroup )" and change it to like this.

new ArrayObject( [Low] )
   {
      class = "GraphicsQualityLevel";
      caseSensitive = true;
                  
      key["$pref::lightManager"] = "Advanced Lighting";
      key["$pref::Shadows::disable"] = true;   		//yorks was false
      key["$pref::Shadows::textureScalar"] = 0.5;
      key["$pref::Shadows::filterMode"] = "None";   //yorks was "SoftShadow"  
   };

See if that helps any.

#9 for a card that low-end, i would suggest not using terrain.

torque3d has nice terrain, but its not cheap. if you're using terrain, deleting it should dramatically increase your performance.