Blitz Max runs massively slow

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Blitz Max runs massively slow

Leon Brown(Posted 2005) [#1]
Bought BlitzMax yesterday, but it runs very slow on my laptop. My laptop uses a Pentium3 at 750Mhz and has 256MB ram; not the most uptodate laptop, but serves my needs.

As I'm writing an educational game that is to be used in schools, I need to be able to ensure that my game is playable on specs similar to my laptop, if not lower. I've had no problems in using Blitz3D on my laptop, but BlitzMax runs at about 1FPS.

I've installed update 1.10, and just to check, I tried to enter the command to use DirectX, but this command isn't recognised... Anyone have any ideas?


(tu) ENAY(Posted 2005) [#2]
BMax is unfortunately just really quite slow, there isn't a fix. Unless 1.5-2GHz machines are your lowest spec machines I'd stick with Blitz2D/3D.


Leon Brown(Posted 2005) [#3]
Do you think there will be any changes in the future? I mean, to require a 1.5Ghz machine to run Space Invaders is just silly! Even my Spectrum could do better than that...

Also how would BlitzMax run on a Mac Mini running at 1.25Ghz and 512MB RAM?


Dreamora(Posted 2005) [#4]
It should run fine.

On a Windows PC DirectX is used per default (otherwise you can use setgraphicsdriver d3d7max2ddriver () ).

Perhaps the update was not finished? did you update and do a sync mod afterwards? :-)

Apple's playbox shouldn't have problems with an invader as well


Robert Cummings(Posted 2005) [#5]
Update your drivers, it should still be smooth on a 500mhz p3 with a half decent 3D card. It's not as if it's doing much throwing a few triangles about. It should be a lot faster than Blitz3D's sprites.

I'm sure you're doing something a bit daft.

Sounds like it's still trying to run under opengl and you don't have the 1.10 update installed.


Leon Brown(Posted 2005) [#6]
Excellent! Thanks guys! I had to synchronise the update - now it runs at full speed.


tonyg(Posted 2005) [#7]
@Enay, if you're having speed problems maybe you should post something and see if there's a fix.


boomboommax(Posted 2005) [#8]
was gonna say @Enay your pc has problems, big problems.


FlameDuck(Posted 2005) [#9]
BMax is unfortunately just really quite slow, there isn't a fix. Unless 1.5-2GHz machines are your lowest spec machines I'd stick with Blitz2D/3D.
Not true. Pretty much everything I've tried runs well on the TabletPC and that's roughly the equivalent of a 600Mhz Pentium 2 (maybe a 450Mhz once you install SP2).


Who was John Galt?(Posted 2005) [#10]
yeah runs like ligtning on my P3 1Gig with Geforce2. Ran unbelievably slow before I updated the graphics drivers.


FBEpyon(Posted 2005) [#11]
I have ran some of my game on a 500mhz AMD, and it ran fine, it also only has a TNT2 in it, it doesn't run with OpenGL, but if you run DX7 graphic mode it runs fine, so I don't know why others are having problems..


Neuro(Posted 2005) [#12]
My laptop uses a Pentium3 at 750Mhz and has 256MB ram


I'm running the exact same specs on my older Dell Latitude at work and its running BlitzMax without much problems. I do notice certain things are a bit slow but for the most part, but after upgrading my weakass video driver, it help out a lot.


ckob(Posted 2005) [#13]
god it runs on my 400 mhz laptop with a 16 mb video card


Robert Cummings(Posted 2005) [#14]
tonyg (Posted 2005-08-12 05:53:56)
@Enay, if you're having speed problems maybe you should post something and see if there's a fix.


{cYanide} (Posted 2005-08-12 06:16:50)
was gonna say @Enay your pc has problems, big problems.

Mentalistic Codez


I guess you're both in need of glasses then cos his sig states:
PENTIUM II 333Mhz MMX CPU, VOODOO BANSHEE 16MB, 320MB RAM



Tom Darby(Posted 2005) [#15]
Just to chime in, my primary development box is a first-gen 12" Al PowerBook, and BlitzMax runs like a dream for me...


boomboommax(Posted 2005) [#16]
didnt notice the banshee, that would do it


skidracer(Posted 2005) [#17]
gameboy: is the UseD3D7 command recognized on your installation?

Enay: BlitzMax with the default DirectX7 drivers should be out performing original Blitz. All the profiling I have seen to date indicates it as being so.

The only factors I can see that would result in BlitzMax giving such a poor impression are:

1. Samples included with BlitzMax have very high fill and blending rate requirements

2. BlitzMax had delayed DirectX7 support so average XP user would have been exposed to the truly dreadful microsoft gl software renderer

3. There could still be some specific problems with the DirectX7 drivers in which case the constructive analysis of symptoms from the Blitz community experiencing such problems being of course extremely appreciated from this end...


Dreamora(Posted 2005) [#18]
as mentioned above: gameboy forgot to sync mod after installing 1.10 update which is why he didn't have the dx mods and dx as default.


Rambo_Bill(Posted 2005) [#19]
FYI: I created a game in BMAX and it ran fine on a 400mhz Win98 machine.


tonyg(Posted 2005) [#20]
@Skidracer, after One-eyed Jack's comment, how does the amount of video card RAM affect BlitzMax opposed to BlitzBasic?
I'm guessing ('cos there's no availvidmem) Bmax DX driver should perform the same as both use system RAM but, with OGL driver, if you run out of Video Ram you could get a performance hit.


xlsior(Posted 2005) [#21]
FYI: I created a game in BMAX and it ran fine on a 400mhz Win98 machine.


It really depends on the video card more than the CPU speed --

One of the programs I threw together got 5 FPS on my 600Mhz laptop with 256MB RAM and crappy ATI Rage Mobility video adapter, and 60+ FPS on an old AMD K6/400 MHz machine with 64MB RAM a Voodoo 3 video adapter.


The r0nin(Posted 2005) [#22]
Jeez, people! Next thing you know, people will be complaining that BlitzMax runs really slow on their abacus!

I think its pretty impressive that BM will run as well as it does on the complete P.O.S.'s some of you have listed. Sure, not everyone who wants to play a small dev/shareware game is going to have a P4 3.0G with a Nvidia 6800GT and a gig of RAM, but, IMHO, BM has a very good balance between features and speed. The faster you want it to run on seriously dated machines, the less robust the language has to be.

Oh, BTW, a P2 with a Banshee!?!? Was it one of the ones the Greeks used to calculate catapult trajectories at Troy? Man, spend a dollar, PC hardware technology has advanced just a little bit since the fall of the Roman Empire...


Dreamora(Posted 2005) [#23]
xlsior: Perhaps you used OpenGL in both cases, which is no problem with voodoo which is crap with DX but vice versa Rage is unusable with OpenGL but superb with DX :-)


(tu) ENAY(Posted 2005) [#24]
On my P2 333, Blitzmax runs everything at like 1 frame every 2-4 seconds. Even the source code examples, so I don't use my main PC for Blitzmax.

However I have two other machines, one a 2Ghz machine and although nowhere near as bad as my P2 333, Blitz3D still runs quicker than Blitzmax. And the newly added DirectX driver for BlitzMax runs slower than the OpenGL one too.

If I figure out what's causing the slowdown I will be sure to let you know. If noone else is experiencing slowdown then great stuff!

At least you'll be able to play my game at full speed when it's finished :)


Hotcakes(Posted 2005) [#25]
It -really- sounds like you are experiencing driver problems, but after all the talk about driver problems you couldn't possibly have not checked that. So I don't know. Eat less cheese? Maybe that's the problem =]


Dreamora(Posted 2005) [#26]
ENAY: The source examples are quite fill rate sucking so they are not that good for old cards, especially not cards which were meant for an api that isn't used anymore (glide). Have you tried to switch all examples to OpenGL driver using setgraphicsdriver glmax2ddriver() before their graphics?
Because I don't really think that your card will perform anywhere next acceptable with DX7 due to its drivers.


(tu) ENAY(Posted 2005) [#27]
Strangely the OpenGL driver runs faster than the DirectX one for me. My drivers are ok, but for users that don't know what drivers are or can't sync their Bmaxc modules, are they just gonna have to put up with questionable slowdown?

Therefore, any tips then for reducing 'fill rate'? :)


Dreamora(Posted 2005) [#28]
This is not strange. You have a voodoo, they are known to be not DX compatible and not nearly as fast with DX as with OpenGL as they were developed for Glide which was "replaced" by OpenGL later.

People that can't sync mod (ie have no actual version), might not be able to use precompiled modules anyway as they will have the wrong module version to link with in which case the compiler throws an error.

People that don't know about drivers etc better shouldn't start programming at all and first learn the "PC usage basics" before starting "teaching the pc new stuff" ;-)
but in general, they will do fine with DX default on Windows as most cards work better with DX than OpenGL (only Voodoo are useless in DX and NVidias have been better optimized for OpenGL due to iD software beeing the writer of NV graphical benchmarks ... aka Doom3 ;-))


(tu) ENAY(Posted 2005) [#29]
Heh. Actually what I meant was people who can't sync modules because they don't own blitzmax and because they are the game player who is playing your game. :)


Dreamora(Posted 2005) [#30]
If they are only player, then they don't have to sync mod as the EXE is compiled. If a new version of BM is there, its up to you to decide if you want to update your app with the new BM version ... if it hasn't any impact, there is no use of it thought :)
*just costs you more traffic*


xlsior(Posted 2005) [#31]
xlsior: Perhaps you used OpenGL in both cases, which is no problem with voodoo which is crap with DX but vice versa Rage is unusable with OpenGL but superb with DX :-)


For microscropic values of superb perhaps -- with the Rage I only got 5-6 FPS in DirectX mode as well.

The Voodoo ran ~15 times faster both in DirectX and OpenGL mode, despite having a quarter of the RAM and 2/3 of the CPU MHz in the system.

That Rage Mobility was seriously underimpressive. From what I've gathered some laptops didn't include the 3D acceleration module, so while 2D DirectX ran pretty smooth, Direct3D and OpenGL reverted to software rendering and did a good impression of frozen molasses in a funnel.


Hotcakes(Posted 2005) [#32]
NVidias have been better optimized for OpenGL due to iD software beeing the writer of NV graphical benchmarks ... aka Doom3 ;-))

Not quite true. nVidia have always been producing top-of-the-line OpenGL ONLY cards for high end rendering purposes, so their GL support has always been quite good. It was ATI that -HAD- to quickly release a beta set of drivers that made OpenGL viable. Before then... I don't know what they were doing, but it seems like it was more of a nightmare than Doom3 itself...


Dreamora(Posted 2005) [#33]
NVs OpenGL is only that good because they bought 3DFX, who had years of experience with Glide and first OpenGL implementations. Otherwise they wouldn't have had home user OpenGL as well.

For rendering cards, which you refer to, a totally different type of driver is needed than for home users. On this sector both had good drivers. But this is of no use to home users.

ATI at least focused on DX drivers for home cards ... thats better than NV who needed to cheat their drivers with "benchmark recognition and set quality to crap" to be at least somewhere next to ATI ;-


Abazek(Posted 2005) [#34]
Was running really slow for me when I first got BlitzMax also... The problem was that I had the following:

Graphics 800,600,16,1

Which I copied/pasted my a program I wrote in BlitzPlus. The problem is that last ",1" which in BlitzPlus means "run in Full Screen mode", but in BlitzMax it means "set refresh rate to 1 FPS"!!!

So if your BlitzMax programs are running slow, check your "Graphics" statement first.

(and if that fails, try updating your Video Driver).


Neuro(Posted 2005) [#35]
(and if that fails, try updating your Video Driver).


Thats what I did and Max ended up running tons faster....amazing what a little driver file can do....