Min requirements
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Min requirements
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| I have a simple 2D scrolling game (lunar lander type) started in BMax on my Mac G5 1.6GHz. When I loaded it on my old Powerbook (G4 433MHz w/8MB GFX card, 512MB RAM, OSX 10.3) it crawls! Actually, 'crawls' may be too 'fast' of a description. I'm assuming it is because of it having only 8MB of VRAM, since the processor easily handled the same game written in TNT BASIC (which didn't even use the VRAM). Even using the bglSwapBuffers and bglSetSwapInterval(0) it crawls. Is the Powerbook that far below the minimum system requirements for BMax or could something else be the problem. What is the oldest Mac people have been able to use BMax with? Other than this, I think BlitzMax has been a great product and I look forward to future releases. |
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| Bmax doesn't run well on my old Pentium 2 400 Geforce2GTS 16mb either. |
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| There is something about Bmax or glMax thats seems to be extremely wastefull with vram. I've done lots of tests and whatever your memory requirements are for B3d/2d in 3d program, you need to double that to do the same thing in Bmax or it chokes. |
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| If it's a VRAM issue, it's more a case of screen resolution/image size than any arbitrary limitation on BlitzMAXes behalf. However I suspect that the gfx card used in the Powerbook isn't the best in the world either. So it could be any number of things. Generally with these things, in todays world, there's no way to tell for sure. Your machine could be well below system requirements, yet the program works flawlessly. Likewise you can be well above the recommended specs, annd still get poor performance in some cases. There are simply too many factors involved to give a concrete answer. General problems would include not enough video memory. Not enough bandwidth between system and video memory. Not enough fillrate on the graphics card (this was the major problem people encountered with James' Rockout demo for example). It's even the kind of thing that's hard to make a rule of thumb for, except "make sure you have a better system than the developers". :o> |
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| Problems are quite simple: Your graphics card have not a that good OpenGL support and as BM fully bases on it, it will have to use your driver emulation fall back in this cases which is extremely slow! |
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| Bmax doesn't run well on my old Pentium 2 400 Geforce2GTS 16mb either. Er... There's no such thinga s a 16mb Geforce 2 GTS, and I assure you my game will run ultra smooth on that setup, and it's developed in BlitzMax. |
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| er 32mb lol. a simple game like rockout runs at about .3FPS with all graphics options on, and 4FPS if you turn off a couple background settings. Runs ok if you turn almost everything off. |
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| Strange. I am thinking it may be that you have a slow graphics card, or maybe your system isn't even using hardware acceleration. Do you have any options in your preferences to turn hardware acceleration on, or do you even have any? It sounds like a very low figure all things considered. Here I have a GeForce 4MX and all the samples run at high speed. It almost sounds like your computer might not be using the GPU. A driver update needed? Also, there are opengl monitor apps out there that let you see whether your implementation of opengl supports hardware acceleration etc. I get a pretty slow few-fps on my little ibook, but up to 100 times the performance with the geforce imac. |
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| You should update your drivers Evak (http://www.guru3d.com, NOT nvidia page as they don't show you the 6X.XX versions which are the only really usable drivers since 44.03 / 45.23) ... sounds like you have some of the old Detonator 2X - 43.XX on that system. |
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| I am thinking it may be that you have a slow graphics card Nope, I also have a geforce2 GTS/32 and using '2d in 3d' in Blitz3d I have plenty of horsepower to play with. Other games that use opengl run nice and fast. |
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| I'm using 7X drivers in both my puters, I think its down to CPU not the graphics card. Particularly when I just upgraded my 6 year old P2 400 system with parts from my old athlon1200. Naturaly that works fine with Bmax. The Geforce2 is a pretty good card and can handle 40,000+ poly levels just fine in BLitz3D. BTW I havent tried newer versions of Bmax as I'm waiting for the 3D module. So Perhaps something got fixes in a newer version. I only updated it twice and went back to blitz3D so that might be the problem there. |
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| I think I found the culprit. My Powerbook uses the ATI Rage LT Pro chipset, which apparently doesn't have any OpenGL drivers under OSX. |
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| I am using BlitzMax without hardware accelleration on a PC, and it works fine. It is not too slow (1.5 ghz centrino - about the equiv of a 2.5 ghz), and 2 gig ram... so I would look into some other problem than graphics. I think some implementations of openGL may just not like Blitz. |
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| My Powerbook uses the ATI Rage LT Pro chipset, which apparently doesn't have any OpenGL drivers under OSX It does - it has software drivers, but they're terribly slow. You should see it running on my 233MHz Powerbook G3. ;) |
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| a simple game like rockout While rockout may be a simple game in terms of how you play it and objects on screen, it is not a simple game for how hard it hits the graphics hardware. Fillrate, not polygon count is the real bottleneck in BlitzMAX.Still, it plays okay (certainly better than 4 FPS) on the TabletPC (which has a very underpowered chip, compared to the GF 2 GTS), so that probably isn't the (only) problem. |
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