Huge framerate drop in the presence of certain objects (SVN)

bassmannate · Post by **bassmannate** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 12:33 pm

Did anyone get the error report? I know hellcat and ace were talking about putting in a option to reduce the size of the textures to solve this problem.

eddit · Post by **eddit** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 1:07 pm

I have a huge dropoff in framerate whenever the wormhole animation appears. It's particularly bad when you are inside the animation coming out the other side. I'd like to be able to disable the animation as it's the only thing that kills performance for me.

Post by **hellcatv** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 9:03 am

disabling the animation is simple: just copy glow_net_stable.bfxm to cyl_stable.bfxm

however...I was looking at that mesh---really really low polygon count--nothing special... not sure why it's slowing you down---
my suspicion is that you're running at high rez---with a card like yours, 800x600 would be the max I could forsee playing the animation...

also it may be slow cus ships in the next system are loading

bassmannate · Post by **bassmannate** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:49 pm

Yeah. It sometimes freezes on me when I jump. Always has. I think it has to do with loading the next system.

Post by **hellcatv** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 1:00 am

freezes..then starts up again I presume? or crashes for good after waiting 2-3 mins

Post by **ace123** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 1:06 am

In the current dataset, it launches hundreds of ships in each system, and that can easily take minutes on slower computers (basically most of the fime from when you load a game to when you are in your ship is launching ambient traffic, so that should give you a good estimate of the amount of time it will take to jump to a system as well.

Post by **klauss** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 3:38 am

That mesh (wormholesomething.bfxm) is using shaders, that's why it's slowing things down. Removing the specmap should fix it. I'll do when I get a chance, but it may not be very soon, so if anyone feels up to it...

BTW: I think traffic launch was made incremental to avoid just that. However, it may very well be that the time between ship launches isn't big enough to avoid an unplayable slowdown, so it may be time to tune that (in something_launch.py and related files). Also, if the game is running low on memory and swapping, no amount of incrementality will stop it from stuttering like crazy when launching ships.

bassmannate · Post by **bassmannate** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 3:46 am

Yes. It freezes and then starts back up about 5-10 seconds later. It looks really cool when it DOESN'T freeze but it's not a bug that annoys me enough to complain.

Now, as far as my video card is concerned, I have convinced my wife to let me install Linux on the desktop (primarily her computer) which has an nvidia card in it. While I would LOVE to get this working smoothly on this computer, if worst comes to worst, I wouldn't be surprised if a change of cards fixes the problem. I don't foresee ATI helping me out any time soon.

Miramor · Post by **Miramor** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:57 am

Hmm. Is there any way to turn shaders off for *everything*?

Post by **loki1950** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 1:11 am

rename the programs folder where they live so they are not found at execution time

Enjoy the Choice

Miramor · Post by **Miramor** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 2:08 am

Ohh... Never mind, that was tried and was ineffective.

bassmannate · Post by **bassmannate** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 3:24 am

So, it looks like you can choose your ship in the latest svn. I chose a llama and I got the same result when I viewed my ship. I chose anything other than that (haven't tried them all) and I don't get a drop in framerate when I view my ship.

Miramor · Post by **Miramor** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 6:28 pm

Hmm. I never got a framerate drop when viewing my ship, that might be unique to the latest version though.

bassmannate · Post by **bassmannate** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 6:54 pm

It's always been that way for me in svn. It's nice and smooth when I'm not in a llama but when I'm in a llama I can't view my own ship without a framerate drop.

bassmannate · Post by **bassmannate** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 12:03 am

Curiosity has gotten the best of me. I'm downloading the SVN onto windows to see if the hardware change affects the performance issues.

Edit: This machine has a nvidia card as well as a 3GHz P4, 1.5 GB of ram.

bassmannate · Post by **bassmannate** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 12:57 pm

Ok, it appears that my problem is fixed on the other box. However, I still get the weird pulse problem where the framerate will sometimes drop when I approach a base or something and the view will pulse in and out from zoomed in to normal. Ace knows what I'm talking about.

Post by **klauss** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 5:42 pm

That's SPEC-FOV acting weird when there is irregular stuttering. I've noticed it happening when there's too much swapping to-from virtual memory (but might happen with other forms of stuttering).
Perhaps SPEC-FOV code should be revised a bit - I'll do when I get home.

bassmannate · Post by **bassmannate** » Tue Oct 02, 2007 1:48 pm

Looks like it's fixed! Thanks!

vegastriker1000 · Post by **vegastriker1000** » Tue Aug 11, 2009 4:24 pm

Hey guys, i just downloaded VegaStrike and I'm still experiencing the big frame rate drop problem when in presence of big ships or objects - which you have been discussing through this thread, which by the way is the only one addressing this problem.

I was wondering if any solution or fix has been found, since last post has been written 2 years ago.

I tried with moving away the /programs folder but it didnt fix things up.

Here are my system specs:

intel cpu @ 1.73Ghz
ram 1gb
video adapter: Ati Radeon Xpress 200M Series with 256Mb of memory

running windows xp sp3

When i see my own ships or planets framerate is about 60/s
When i see big ships it goes down to 3-4-5 per second.

Any advice?

Thanks for your collaboration!

See ya around in vegastrike space, if i can fix this!

TBeholder · Post by **TBeholder** » Tue Aug 11, 2009 4:44 pm

It happens... may depend on drivers, of course. And driver's parameters (set in Control Center). Try to tweak them to "performance" side.
Also, try to change details and shaders grade into vssetup.

vegastriker1000 · Post by **vegastriker1000** » Thu Aug 13, 2009 5:04 am

ok i fixed that myself by updating ati drivers to latest version.
But that has been a pain in the ass because ati drivers would constatly refuse to install and the installer kept saying "setup will stop because there is no compatible hardware for the driver you are trying to install" and that tricked me out into thinking i was installing the wrong driver package so i kept looking for the right one on and on... But first one was the "exactly appropriate" one and the only way i found to get it going was avoiding using the ati installer and rather letting windows xp ask me for a new driver (i did this by uninstalling the previous video device driver in control panel-system-hardware, and then by deleting all default ati drivers included in windows using driver cleaner pro 1.5 freeware so that when i rebooted, the system was forced to ask me for a path to new drivers for the newly detected video device) and then by browsing to the folder where i previously had ati installer extract the files to (C:\ATI\Support\_name_of_the_driver_package_\Driver\Driver\XP_INF), selecting the .inf file and then choosing the right video card model from the list.
It worked so now framerate doesn't slow down anymore... so...
..Hope this can help

See you in space

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Huge framerate drop in the presence of certain objects (SVN)

Turning wormhole animation off

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