[CF-Devel] GTK Client performance

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

I am running a 1280 x 1024 display at 8 bit color.  XFree86 4.0.3.
I have a PCI Hercules Dynamite 128 Video card - A very fast card
in its day and when the Pentium 120 was a reasonable processor.

I am using the ET6000 driver.

The culprit is SDL.  When I turn SDL support off, I no longer
experience performance problems when the map is full of monsters.
Trouble is, with 8 bit color, without SDL, colors are very distorted.

Maybe I need to switch cards to one that will support 1280 at a
higher number of colors to fix the distortion (though I will hate
to give up booting the console in 132x60 text mode).

I re-enabled a larger map display (12x12) and icon scaling.  None
of the performance problems recurred.

Whatever SDL support is doing - it dramatically affects client
performance.

At 09:33 AM 8/16/02, you wrote:

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     Le Dimanche 11 Août 2002 19:06, Kevin R. Bulgrien a écrit :
     
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      The system is a P120, 80MB.  With X running, I  am  running on the
     
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      edge where swap has to be used, but, even swapping is done, it is the
     
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      number of monsters that kills the client, not the fact that swapping
     
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      is being done because in town or other maps where there are few creatures,
     
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      the client performs ok.
     
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      It does not seem to be a server issue, because when the server is on this
     
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      same machine, other clients like the Windows DX client do not slow down
     
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      when the GTK client is slow.  The slowness also occurs (in GTK only)
     
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      when I'm using other servers on the net.  Other players on the same
     
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      server, on the same map, do not see the slowness with the DX client.
     
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     Many points can influence the speed of 2D screen drawing; the most common 
     
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     bottlenecks are:
     
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     - - Resolution: always favor 16bits 800x600 over 24 or 32bits 1024x768
     
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     - - Video Drivers: which drivers do you use with X ? Some are very fast, but 
     
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     some others are quite slow. The version of X used (3.3.x or 4.x) is also 
     
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     quite important.
     
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     - - Processes: Do you have many processes running in the background ? What is 
     
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     the charge of your system ?
     
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     It could also be interesting to test the performances with the cfclient (yes, 
     
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     the ugly-looking-one-nobody-but-me-probably-uses-anymore :P) and see if you 
     
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     get different results.
     
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     SDL should theorically give faster results than standard GFX access; however, 
     
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     since SDL doesn't make direct calls to the hardware, but relies on the 
     
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     available drivers, it is difficult to predict its influence in that case.
     
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     The GFX hardware shouldn't be the problem here in any case - even in the times 
     
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     of P120s, graphic cards were able to manage the blit requirements for a game 
     
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     like Crossfire. 
     
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     (For reference, I run the GTK client on a P133 with a CL5436 Mb GFX card 
     
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     without problems - the resolution I use is 800x600x16bpp)
     
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     - -- 
     
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     Y. Chachkoff