Shimmering blue light killed the framerate
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- Explorer
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Shimmering blue light killed the framerate
That fancy new shimmering blue light animation in svn used for a damaged mining base looks very nice and all that, but for me it makes the fps drop to about 3. Can I turn it off somehow?
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- Confed Special Operative
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You know I was wondering the same thing, except I usually see it If I'm destrying one of those Thades Pirate ships. I get a good number of shots in, 3/4 damaged, and there is a (purple) gas escaping, and the framerate just plummets. And i can hardly keep the ship in the center of the screen anymore, so my shots are almost worthless.
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Yes it happened again a while later with a pirate corvette ("Thalus"?).
But!
Changing (vegastrike.config)
(default for Geforce3 cards)
to:
(default for Geforce2 cards)
..seemed to do the trick. (Unless it was something else and it was rather me restarting VS that cleaned up a temporary problem, a memory leak or something.)
But!
Changing (vegastrike.config)
Code: Select all
<var name="max_cubemap_size" value="65536"/>
to:
Code: Select all
<var name="max_cubemap_size" value="512"/>
..seemed to do the trick. (Unless it was something else and it was rather me restarting VS that cleaned up a temporary problem, a memory leak or something.)
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- Confed Special Operative
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I brought mine down to 4096, just to try a different amount, unfortunately it didn't seem to make a difference. But you may be on the right track. If I change the reflectivity of some of the ships, or even drop that number lower, it might make a difference. But as of testing this night, I don't see it.
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Tonight I took the time to try the cubemap size of 512. Didn't look like it made much difference on my end. Hmm. Have to look for something else. But the problem is definitely the blue fog/sparks that fly from damaged ships. Too much calculation and power going into making the blue. You know, maybe i should just try the entire Geforce2 settings and see if it really is less intensive on my system.
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- Confed Special Operative
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Well, I tried using the Geforce2 settings, no beans.
Then I turned off Per Pixel Lighting, leaving only the other two, separate specular color and reflective lighting. Performance improved slightly, but not enough to make it smooth.
I don't know what it is about that escaping gas or whatever it is, but it seems pretty difficult to get good performance when I find it, even when I lower the intensity of my settings.
I wonder if this issue exists at all with higher performing graphics cards. But its probably because many small objects are being calculated, and each object is interacting with the light coming from around it, from the stars and the discharging weapons. I am almost betting that if the special effects were removed for just that blue gas, that it wouldn't hurt the image quality at all.
But since I ran out of ideas to research, I think that my system will just lag and this might be my last post to the thread.
Then I turned off Per Pixel Lighting, leaving only the other two, separate specular color and reflective lighting. Performance improved slightly, but not enough to make it smooth.
I don't know what it is about that escaping gas or whatever it is, but it seems pretty difficult to get good performance when I find it, even when I lower the intensity of my settings.
I wonder if this issue exists at all with higher performing graphics cards. But its probably because many small objects are being calculated, and each object is interacting with the light coming from around it, from the stars and the discharging weapons. I am almost betting that if the special effects were removed for just that blue gas, that it wouldn't hurt the image quality at all.
But since I ran out of ideas to research, I think that my system will just lag and this might be my last post to the thread.
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From a freshly unpacked version of 043 --
No default is provided (in the config file) for "sparklerate"
Code: Select all
<var name="sparkleabsolutespeed" value="42"/>
<var name="sparklefixedsize" value="false"/>
<var name="sparklescale" value="8"/>
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
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- Confed Special Operative
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Yeah, I noticed that. I thought perhaps there was a default rate hardcoded in. I found a reference to sparklerate in the file src/cmd/units.cpp at the very end. ~line number 550. But I can't really read the code all that well. I was wondering if 5 was the hardcoded default, or If I am completly reading it wrong.
Code: Select all
static float sparklerate = XMLSupport::parse_float ( vs_config->getVariable("graphics","sparklerate","5") );
sparkle_accum += GetElapsedTime()*sparklerate;
int spawn=(int)(sparkle_accum);
sparkle_accum -= spawn;
while (spawn-- > 0) {
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