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