[CF-Devel] GTK Client performance

[Michael Toennies]

Yes, your problem is the 8bit color part = 256 palette screen.

SDL is awful slow with it. In my tests with the sdl client, i never get
better performance like 10%-25% of the 16bit screen. Perhaps you should try
16bit color screen.

Depending on your mainboard bus and gfx card, the speed of your computer
can be faster as with 8bit (cache and bus wide effects).

Iam also not sure about how SDL is really speed up windowed widget
application
like the gtk client. Anyone really has benchmarked it? I guess it, because
you need
to adjust your application for the selected SDL blitting functions.

If you mess up the settings (which can change from system to system) then
your performance
can change by factor 10. I got frames by 60+ using hardware support by
dropping down to <6
frames by using false software emus. And windowed mode means nearly all
times using the SDL software
emus.

I had played around with the pure SDL client about 2 weeks to find the right
setup.

As i remember the sdl support in the gtk client was not a speed patch, it
was a patch for
using alpha & transparent effects like alpha shadows.

I have a real big options file for the daimonin sdl client, and changing
there only 1 or 2 settings
will invoke a large range of different modes and effects with nearly all fps
between 5 to 250 (!)
(on my p500 with voodoo 3/3000 system ).

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      I am running a 1280 x 1024 display at 8 bit color.  XFree86 4.0.3.
     
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      I have a PCI Hercules Dynamite 128 Video card - A very fast card
     
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      in its day and when the Pentium 120 was a reasonable processor.
     
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      I am using the ET6000 driver.
     
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      The culprit is SDL.  When I turn SDL support off, I no longer
     
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      experience performance problems when the map is full of monsters.
     
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      Trouble is, with 8 bit color, without SDL, colors are very distorted.
     
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      Maybe I need to switch cards to one that will support 1280 at a
     
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      higher number of colors to fix the distortion (though I will hate
     
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      to give up booting the console in 132x60 text mode).
     
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      I re-enabled a larger map display (12x12) and icon scaling.  None
     
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      of the performance problems recurred.
     
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      Whatever SDL support is doing - it dramatically affects client
     
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      performance.
     
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      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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      >
     
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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
     
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      few creatures,
     
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      >> the client performs ok.
     
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      >>
     
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      >> It does not seem to be a server issue, because when the server
     
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      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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      >>
     
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      >Many points can influence the speed of 2D screen drawing; the
     
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      most common
     
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      >bottlenecks are:
     
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      >
     
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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
     
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      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
     
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      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
     
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      cfclient (yes,
     
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      >the ugly-looking-one-nobody-but-me-probably-uses-anymore :P) and
     
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      see if you
     
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      >get different results.
     
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      >SDL should theorically give faster results than standard GFX
     
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      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 -
     
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      even in the times
     
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      >of P120s, graphic cards were able to manage the blit
     
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      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
     
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