Blitz3D faster with debug enabled! Why?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Blitz3D faster with debug enabled! Why?
| ||
| Hi, Last week I upgraded to a new system that should be faster than my old one, and, with the exception of Blitz3D, it seems to be working as expected. I installed Blitz and updated it to 1.85, ran a few of the 3D samples to make sure it was running as well as it always has for me. To my amazement the graphics were slow and choppy except when I used windowed mode or debug enabled, which made the graphics much more fluid. I figured it was either a driver issue or the new integrated on board chip set, so I downloaded and installed the latest platform/nForce unified driver from Nvidia - same results with Blitz3D. Other software, games etc., seem to work fine. Here are my specs, old and new. Any help would be appreciated. Old System Aopen P3 833 MHz 256 MB RAM Geforce2 MX/MX 400 64 MB RAM Win98SE DirectX 9.0b SoundBlaster Live New System Shuttle MN31N with AMD AthlonXP 2500+ 1.83MHz 512 MB 333 MHz DDR RAM nForce2 IGP (Geforce 4 MX) & integrated sound WinXP Pro with Service Pack 1 DirectX 9.0b Alan C. |
| ||
| One possibility is that you aren't specifying colour depth - in which case your graphics card might be defaulting to 32 bit instead of 16...? |
| ||
| Thanks for the reply GfK but I tried it at 16 and 32 bit colour depth and with various resolutions with the same results. I'm thinking it might be these new integrated graphic chips from NVidia on the main board. I'm not really familiar with this type of setup. Maybe someone on the forum can shed some light. AC |
| ||
| Are you running the latest drivers for your graphics chipset? |
| ||
| I think it's a simple smoothness issue. You bollocked up with your timing code somewhere. If you post source we can see something concrete... |
| ||
| Maybe it's the Athlon 2500+ 1.83MHz processor. Seems to be well underclocked. ;) ---------------- How much RAM is allocated to the graphics card? |
| ||
| Click on the windows XP start button...then click on run...at the pop up box asking for a EXE to execute type in "dxdiag" This is a little utility to diagnose DX problems, there are a couple of tests that it will run to check for capability with several of the latest DX versions (your new system might have issues with DX7, which is what Blitz requires) Generaly when a program (say your game) tries to do something in DX, and DX for whatever reason cannot get the hardware to comply...then DX uses a software backup routine instead, usualy DX will tell you it's doing this...but Blitz doesn't have any way to check that (I'm guessing that debug mode does and tells DX to use other meathods...while your game EXE doesn't have that option, and without an answer DX just does it's best with the software backup routines)...you can find out all about this stuff on the DX website and through the DX SDK. |
| ||
| In WINDOW mode I always have higher framerates, because there your refreshrate or the monitor don't block the app. I think it is your onboard graphic chip that slows everything down. |
| ||
| The new system is simply doing something different with the vwaits, hence the illusion it is faster in debug. It isn't faster, it's slowed down enough for it to be a little smoother. |
| ||
| Thanks everyone for your assistance with my problem. In response to your questions and suggestions: yes, I'm using the latest drivers for the graphics chip. I don't think it's a timing code issue since the code I ran as a sort of benchmark test are the 3D samples that come with Blitz3D such as Mak's castle demo, teapot demo, xfighter demo etc. The processor is 1.83 GHz not 1.83 MHz as posted. Sorry for the typo. 64MB of RAM are allocated to the graphics chip - this should be sufficient. I ran DXDiag and both the DirectDraw and Direct3D tests ran successfully. I noticed that both the little bouncing square and the spinning cube were quite slow compared to my old system so I figured the problem is with my new system graphic chip, not Blitz3D. I re-installed my old GeForce2 card, which should be less capable than the integrated G3Force4 chip, and now Blitz3D is working much better. Even the DirectDraw and Direct3D tests within DXDiag appear to be faster and smoother. I think the problem is my new system. Maybe the integrated graphics chips don't work as well as a discrete graphics card. AC |
| ||
| Integrated graphics usually suck. When i had my old computer, a PCI graphics card was faster than the on-board stuff :) |
| ||
| intigrated cards are usually the pits They tend to be cheap cards to save the mobo manufacturer and you money |
   |