Mac engine far slower than PC engine on same machine.
by Steve Howson · in Torque Game Engine · 11/04/2006 (7:21 am) · 29 replies
Hi all!
I got 1.5 the other day and while it looks great, it's "jittery" in Tiger.
In the demo or any of the starters, if I look around it will pause for a second then catch up.. it's as if there's lag or something.
On the same machine I boot into Windows and it runs beautifully, now slowdowns at all.
It's a 2Ghz Cor Duo iMac with 2GB RAM.
Anyone have any advice on how I can tweak the engine or my settings in Tiger to get good performance.
Oh, it's not just with the starters and demo either, I created a new flat level with no objects (other than the player of course) and still has the same issue.
Thanks
I got 1.5 the other day and while it looks great, it's "jittery" in Tiger.
In the demo or any of the starters, if I look around it will pause for a second then catch up.. it's as if there's lag or something.
On the same machine I boot into Windows and it runs beautifully, now slowdowns at all.
It's a 2Ghz Cor Duo iMac with 2GB RAM.
Anyone have any advice on how I can tweak the engine or my settings in Tiger to get good performance.
Oh, it's not just with the starters and demo either, I created a new flat level with no objects (other than the player of course) and still has the same issue.
Thanks
#22
11/19/2006 (1:13 am)
I use Torque in a Imac coreduo 2,3 Ghz. - 2Gb RAM, Radeon X1600, and Torque 1.5 demo runs also much slower in Mac than in Win (same machine). About a half fpss. (50 in Mac, more than 100 in PC).
#23
11/19/2006 (11:23 am)
@MasterTreb: I'm on a Core2 duo as well. This machine just arrived from Apple three days ago. I don't mind the fans -- it's to be expected. But the relative slowness of 1.5 needs to be addressed -- especially considering that this is a top of the line laptop.
#24
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/9849
and see if your load is peaking.
11/19/2006 (4:43 pm)
What I'm saying is I think the problem is being caused by Torque 1.5 unnecesarily throwing a lot of commands to the CPU when being run by a mac. One way to see if this is the case is to run a CPU monitor like this onehttp://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/9849
and see if your load is peaking.
#25
TGE 1.5 is running quite smoothly... not as fast as my pentium 4 - 3 ghz, but still playable... I can drive around in the starter.racing demo, jump etc... while using iTunes and more programs at once and I have no troubles...
However I must admit that my eye can detect a lower frame rate if I compare it to my XP based pc.
Only when the car is rolling on itself after an accident and the whole world is rotating quite fast I experience poor frame rate...
Edited grammar... to make it more understandable :D :P
11/20/2006 (2:32 pm)
I have a new iMac 17'' Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 Ghz with 512 mb of ram and graphic card: Intel GMA 950 ( I believe ), updated version of Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger...TGE 1.5 is running quite smoothly... not as fast as my pentium 4 - 3 ghz, but still playable... I can drive around in the starter.racing demo, jump etc... while using iTunes and more programs at once and I have no troubles...
However I must admit that my eye can detect a lower frame rate if I compare it to my XP based pc.
Only when the car is rolling on itself after an accident and the whole world is rotating quite fast I experience poor frame rate...
Edited grammar... to make it more understandable :D :P
#26
In no particular order:
1. OpenGL performance under MacOSX is not as good as OpenGL performance under Windows. This is confirmable, and Apple has some new goodies coming out for MacOSX 10.5 (Leopard) that will help address this.
2. Torque terrain performance needs optimization for Intel Macs. If you profile Torque 1.5, when looking at a scene that's dominated by terrain, you'll notice that the OpenGL driver is convolving every texel that comes out of the terrain blender. It's also using the old C blender, not the Altivec blender ( no altivec on Intel ). Unfortunately, the x86 asm blender doesn't output textures in the correct format for Mac OpenGL. The colors get munged. So what we have here is the need to really dig deep into the blender and write some new code that will make it deliver the correct texture format for Mac-Intel OpenGL. There was no time for me to do this before the release of Torque 1.5, and I'd rather work on getting TSE w/ Atlas terrain up and running anyway... So, fixing this isn't high on my priority list.
3. The demo mission makes extensive use of the Lighting Kit. Try deleting some of the lights in that scene, and watch your fps suddenly soar.
4. The demo mission interiors are very high poly. The buildings are absolutely beautiful work from the amazing mister Tim Aste. They were designed to look great. They were also designed to target cutting edge hardware. I'll talk to Tim about some performance tweaking on those.
I see a lot of complaints here, but I don't see anyone reporting Shark profiling info from Torque 1.5. Shark is awesome, and it should be your first or second stop for diagnosing performance issues on the Mac. Use it, if you find anything interesting, feel free to share it here in the Mac forum. I don't have access to every current Mac hardware configuration, so some Macs will have issues I can't test for directly. That info out of Shark can really help me help you.
I think... I need another pair of hands devoted to Mac code at GG... An intern would surely have plenty to do.
/Paul
12/04/2006 (8:06 pm)
Ok, folks there are several things going on with the speed issues in Torque 1.5 on the Mac:In no particular order:
1. OpenGL performance under MacOSX is not as good as OpenGL performance under Windows. This is confirmable, and Apple has some new goodies coming out for MacOSX 10.5 (Leopard) that will help address this.
2. Torque terrain performance needs optimization for Intel Macs. If you profile Torque 1.5, when looking at a scene that's dominated by terrain, you'll notice that the OpenGL driver is convolving every texel that comes out of the terrain blender. It's also using the old C blender, not the Altivec blender ( no altivec on Intel ). Unfortunately, the x86 asm blender doesn't output textures in the correct format for Mac OpenGL. The colors get munged. So what we have here is the need to really dig deep into the blender and write some new code that will make it deliver the correct texture format for Mac-Intel OpenGL. There was no time for me to do this before the release of Torque 1.5, and I'd rather work on getting TSE w/ Atlas terrain up and running anyway... So, fixing this isn't high on my priority list.
3. The demo mission makes extensive use of the Lighting Kit. Try deleting some of the lights in that scene, and watch your fps suddenly soar.
4. The demo mission interiors are very high poly. The buildings are absolutely beautiful work from the amazing mister Tim Aste. They were designed to look great. They were also designed to target cutting edge hardware. I'll talk to Tim about some performance tweaking on those.
I see a lot of complaints here, but I don't see anyone reporting Shark profiling info from Torque 1.5. Shark is awesome, and it should be your first or second stop for diagnosing performance issues on the Mac. Use it, if you find anything interesting, feel free to share it here in the Mac forum. I don't have access to every current Mac hardware configuration, so some Macs will have issues I can't test for directly. That info out of Shark can really help me help you.
I think... I need another pair of hands devoted to Mac code at GG... An intern would surely have plenty to do.
/Paul
#27
So the bottom line is the terrain blender? How does the Mac OpenGL texture format differ from Windows OpeGL texture format, other than endianness? And if altivec helped, shouldn't the Intel blender be using SSE instructions?
12/04/2006 (8:35 pm)
Paul, if I'm not mistaken there's another thread on the same topic with some results from Shark... I believe it was Alex. If not I'm happy to do whatever Shark legwork you need. So the bottom line is the terrain blender? How does the Mac OpenGL texture format differ from Windows OpeGL texture format, other than endianness? And if altivec helped, shouldn't the Intel blender be using SSE instructions?
#28
I posted some shark output in this thread. It had to do with TLK integrated with 1.5. I don't know the code well enough yet to dig around right now. I remember someone else posted some shark output somewhere [Rob might be right... Alex?] but I can't seem to find it right now.
"I need another pair of hands devoted to Mac code at GG..."
[*puts hand up*] I'm looking for a half-time job in the new year :-)
12/04/2006 (10:05 pm)
@PaulI posted some shark output in this thread. It had to do with TLK integrated with 1.5. I don't know the code well enough yet to dig around right now. I remember someone else posted some shark output somewhere [Rob might be right... Alex?] but I can't seem to find it right now.
"I need another pair of hands devoted to Mac code at GG..."
[*puts hand up*] I'm looking for a half-time job in the new year :-)
#29
Apple's opengl requires GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_1_5_5_5_REV format textures for fast texture upload.
The blender is set up to output GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_5_5_1 format textures when on little endian systems.
The asm blender is set up to output GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_5_5_1 textures, period.
The altivec blender outputs GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_1_5_5_5_REV textures.
Altivec does not run on Intel based Macs.
The blender is rather arcane, and my efforts at getting GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_1_5_5_5_REV out of it on little endian macs, have not been successful so far.
I would rather spend my time working on getting new tech available on the Mac, than on hacking on the old terrain.
Share and Enjoy,
/Paul
12/06/2006 (4:53 pm)
@Rob: The problem with the blender is:Apple's opengl requires GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_1_5_5_5_REV format textures for fast texture upload.
The blender is set up to output GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_5_5_1 format textures when on little endian systems.
The asm blender is set up to output GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_5_5_1 textures, period.
The altivec blender outputs GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_1_5_5_5_REV textures.
Altivec does not run on Intel based Macs.
The blender is rather arcane, and my efforts at getting GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_1_5_5_5_REV out of it on little endian macs, have not been successful so far.
I would rather spend my time working on getting new tech available on the Mac, than on hacking on the old terrain.
Share and Enjoy,
/Paul
Torque Owner Dracola
I think what is happening here is the CPU is getting hit really hard. It might be a good Idea to check the CPU load, there are a couple programs to do that though I don't know which work on Mac based systems. If there is something unnecesarily running a whole bunch of commands to the CPU that would explain why Steve's macbook is holding up better than his iMac since the Core 2 Duo is nearly twice as powerful.