Soldier Pack causing 100 fps drop
by Kip Carr · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 09/22/2005 (7:09 am) · 10 replies
I was playing aroudn today trying to get my terrain working and was running around with the soldier and with just the soldier, terrain, and skybox entities i was getting somewhere around 59 fps. I thought that was a bit low so i decided to "alt c" to just get the camera and fly around the terrain to see if there were any anomolies. Next thing i notice once the soldier is off screen im getting 170+ fps. Why would the soldier be causeing a 100+ fps drop. Any time i have him on screen i go back down to the 50 fps. Any one have any ideas why this is?
#2
09/22/2005 (11:07 am)
Cool so there is a fix for it now?
#3
Tom Spilman suggested using DXT compression on the space orc's textures as a potential fix. There are a great many things that could be causing slowdowns - some are very much hardware, driver, and configuration specific. Making sure you aren't actively using a texture set larger than your available memory is one good idea - that requires the hardware to page things off disk, which is super slow.
09/23/2005 (8:49 pm)
It's unoptimized, not broken.Tom Spilman suggested using DXT compression on the space orc's textures as a potential fix. There are a great many things that could be causing slowdowns - some are very much hardware, driver, and configuration specific. Making sure you aren't actively using a texture set larger than your available memory is one good idea - that requires the hardware to page things off disk, which is super slow.
#4
09/26/2005 (4:29 am)
How do i check the size of my texture set? I know i am using a decent amount of textures when i have buildings in there and all but i was getting this slow down with nothing but a 8k x 8k terrain and a soldier. My terrain texture is pretty big but i dont think that should really make that big of a difference. Is there a script out there i could run to get the texture information and things like that back from TGE into TSE so i could start seeing what kind of resources i am using?
#5
10/02/2005 (11:24 pm)
Run NVPerfHud on nvidia cards, or the ATI equivalent (forget the name) on ATI cards...
#6
10/03/2005 (6:08 am)
I dled NVPerfHud on it and i looked at the graphs. Unfortunetly the only thing i see is that the lines for GPU idle and Ms per frame go up. No real memory change or AGP memory change. A red dot infront of VB does lite up whenever the soldier is on the screen. I havent been able to figure out what that means yet but i will look around anf try to find out. So far this hasnt really told me anything.
#7
10/03/2005 (6:42 am)
Ok well i have played around with it a bit more and it seems that the VB i was looking at is that the game is creating a Vertex Buffer at every frame. Is this normal? I wouldnt think you would need to create the buffer at every frame. Besides that if i turn off the PS 1.0 shaders the terrain goes green all the time which is fine but then if i have the soldier on screen then the whole screen gets a green tint to it, so it seems that for some reason there is a PS applied to everything when the soldier is on screen. Anyone have any ideas on this one?
#8
10/03/2005 (7:54 am)
Ok well i have played around with it a bit more and it seems that the VB i was looking at is that the game is creating a Vertex Buffer at every frame. Is this normal? I wouldnt think you would need to create the buffer at every frame. Besides that if i turn off the PS 1.0 shaders the terrain goes green all the time which is fine but then if i have the soldier on screen then the whole screen gets a green tint to it, so it seems that for some reason there is a PS applied to everything when the soldier is on screen. Anyone have any ideas on this one?
#10
11/18/2005 (5:35 am)
Im running release and i get the same thing. It seems to be creating that Vertex Buffer no matter what and i dont know DirectX coding so i cant figure out how to change it. 
Associate Kyle Carter