Unfathomably slow in Windows... Any help/ideas?

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Unfathomably slow in Windows... Any help/ideas?

Abazek(Posted 2005) [#1]
I own both BlitzPlus and Blitz3D. Both are awesome!!
I recently downloaded BlitzMax Demo 1.09 for Windows.

I was really excited about BlitzMax. Just about ready to buy it on the spot... Until I ran my first program about a half hour ago...

I sure hope someone can help, because if BlitzMax is this slow, there's just no chance, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE, I'll ever consider buying it or even recommending it to anyone else. I mean seriously, what good is Cross-Platform compatibility if your programs run worse than badly-written JAVA?

Here's some more info:

To test BlitzMax, I cut-and-pasted in a small program I wrote in BlitzPlus. It uses CreateImage, GrabImage, and DrawImage to make the Game-World out of 32x32 tiles. Pretty simple stuff.

In BlitzPlus this program gets 60 Frames per second (will get much higher if I turn off VBlank Wait).

In BlitzMax Demo 1.09 for Windows, I'm getting an astounding ONE FRAME PER SECOND, or less.

I tried the following things (and did a Build and Run after each):
1. Uncheck "Debug Build" in Build Options
2. Uncheck "Quick Build" and "Build GUI App" in Build Options
3. Turn off AlphaBlending, ie: SetBlend(SOLIDBLEND)
4. Turn on DynamicImage, ie: AutoImageFlags(DYNAMICIMAGE)
5. Turn off all ImageFlags, ie: AutoImageFlags(0)
6. Updated to latest Video Driver

Nothing has helped. I still get 1 FPS.
Any other ideas/suggestions?

Here's some more info about my computer:

OS: Windows XP Sp2
CPU: Athlon 3200+, 400 FSB
RAM: 1 Gig DDR-400
VIDEO: AGP4x GeForce4 Ti4600 with 128 Megs DDR (NVidia Driver 78.01 most recent at time of this writing)
Motherboard Chipset: NForce2 Ultra

Please help... I've got a feeling there's something REALLY obvious I'm missing here. Because there's just no way a simple 2D program should be running THIS slow... As I said, I get 60+ FPS running the same program in BlitzPlus, even on a lesser computer!!


Many many thanks for any suggestions, and for any time you spend helping me out!


Abazek(Posted 2005) [#2]
One more quick thing:
In the Topic, when I put "in Windows" I meant the OS... The program I mentioned is running Full Screen 800x600 16 Bit.


REDi(Posted 2005) [#3]
Hi

Do you have flushmem in your main loop?

*EDIT* also do the sample programs run okay?


Abazek(Posted 2005) [#4]
No flushmem...

But I did just discover something obvious... I had:

Graphics 800,600,16,1

(in BlitzPlus that last ,1 means "full screen mode", but in BlitzMax it means "set refresh to 1 FPS").

Removing that last ,1 sped things up a lot (obviously!)... However its still running a little slower than I would expect it. Doesn't look/feel like 60FPS. I'd say its around 20 or 30... But I haven't put an FPS counter in there yet to be sure (will do that next).

Incidently, I found out about that last ,1 thing in this thread:
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Orientation guide for existing Blitz users

It is very useful if you have done a lot of BlitzPlus programming!!!


PS:
Thanks for the tip about FlushMem. Going to try that out and see if it speeds things up any.

Now that its running at a decent speed, I take back my angry words and instead say: BlitzMax ROCKS!!!


N(Posted 2005) [#5]
Check your drivers.