Bombing framerate

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??? Lauria
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Bombing framerate

Post by ??? Lauria »

This has been an issue that's been bugging me since I first installed the game.

I start out my game, I've got a smooth 60+ FPS going, and I can actually see what I'm doing and I start racking up the points.

Then, after about maybe 10-15 minutes, my framerate suddenly is PEAKING at 30FPS and getting all choppy, and not only do I miss frames and only find out I got killed by an easy target after a three-second freeze, but the entire game just starts running as if through mud and I can barely even see what's going on, and my 50+ score dives into the deep negatives within minutes.

I have an ATI Radeon Express 200 and a 2.4Ghz processor with 960MB of RAM and about 5 gigs of virtual memory.

What's going on here?
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JeffM
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Post by JeffM »

1) what OS?
2) have you actually checked the memory usage to see if it's increasing? or does the framerate just drop?
3) is this a laptop? is it perhaps kicking into a lower power mode?
4) do you have the current video drivers for the chipset? from the manufacturer?
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??? Lauria
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Post by ??? Lauria »

JeffM wrote:1) what OS?
2) have you actually checked the memory usage to see if it's increasing? or does the framerate just drop?
3) is this a laptop? is it perhaps kicking into a lower power mode?
4) do you have the current video drivers for the chipset? from the manufacturer?
1. Windows XP SP2 (MC Edition)
2. I haven't actually checked the memory usage.
3. It's a desktop computer, and I have it to not turn anything off after a period of time.
4. I have the most recent drivers for my OS, yes.
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Post by JeffM »

well for starters, it would be best if you ran bzflag in a window, and kept the task manager up so you can see the memory usage of the "bzflag.exe" process, as you play. Then when it slows down you can see if the application's memory increases dramatically. You should also look and see how much memory the rest of the OS is using, if other things are taking a lot of memory that can cause us to use more virtual memory then we should, and that is slow.

And you have the 7-8-igp_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_sb_gart_enu_50960 drivers, released on august 17th? if so, great.

It looks like you have 64 megs of your 1 gig of ram as video memory. That should be plenty of vram for the standard set of textures we ship with, and a decent sized frame buffer. If you play on maps that make a lot of use of externally loaded textures, that can fill up 64 megs pretty fast when you start looking at mip maps.

BZFlag will only load a texture into openGL's video memory the very first time it's used ( needs to be drawn on the screen ). After that it is left in video memory in case it needs to be drawn again ( loading is very slow, compared to drawing a frame ). It is possible your having more and more textures slowly come into view and be loaded, then going over your 64 gig video limit causing openGL to swap out to system memory via AGP, and that can be slower. You may want to see if you can increase your video ram allocation and see if that helps, but it's just a guess.
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