slow, painful death

dmoisset on 2007/09/24 23:11 of Aurora Fighter

Must... push... polygons... on... screen.

This was our first time on OpenGL, and it seems we were bitten by it. We had a lot of possitive comments, but also a lot of "I get 5-6fps, it is too slow". OK, not painful death, but slow indeed :)

Certainly 6fps is slow, the game was designed to run at 60 (and is perfectly playable if that goes to 35-40).

Unfortunately, we tested several configurations (CPU/OS/video cards) and it worked like a charm. 1.5GHz and old video cards (onboard VIA and intel graphic chipsets, a low-end GeForce2, some old ATI) worked quite fine, so we didn' t worry about optimizing. At some moments it slowed down a little (to 40fps instead of 60), so we profiled, found that it was a CPU bottleneck (not related to GPU), made some improvements, and moved over.

Anyway, it seems that we are doing something that kills performance under some configurations. I am guessing it is not CPU (some people with an AMD4000 had problems), but rather some OpenGL feature that is not hw-accelerated on all cards/drivers (some people have suggested that blending modes could be the cause). I am expecting to find out that our performance was killed by putting the score-gauge on the HUD or something like that :-/ .

That said, if you had problems, please let us know your hardware/OS/libraries configuration. If any of you is willing, I would love to have a chat with you trying to turn off different parts of the game to guess what is killing performance. Thanks!

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Comments

Tigga on 2007/09/24 23:57:

I was getting under 30 fps (usually around 15). I'm on Windows Vista, with a 2.4GHz (duel core) and a GeForce 8600 GTS. Running pygame 1.7.1 and PyOpenGL 3.0.0a6. If I turn of f visual FX it runs about the same speed but reports 0fps in console.

pdallago on 2007/09/25 00:14:

Tigga: can you try this?

Go here: http://www.visionegg.org/Download_and_Install/Install_on_Windows and download the PyOpenGL binary. Then try running the game with that version and report the results.

Tigga on 2007/09/25 00:49:

Ran it with 2.0.2.01 and it ran at a constant 60 fps.

Some profiling results for 3.0.0a6: http://pastebin.com/m1cf31947

dmoisset on 2007/09/25 02:55:

what about other GL games with OpenGL 3.0.0a6? did they run fine?

thanks for the profiling results! I am taking a look at them.

Tigga on 2007/09/25 12:14:

Other games run fine with 3.0.0a6 - it's only yours.