Huge FPS drop with high res textures

YouTube · Post by **Nash** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 12:08

I'm getting huge FPS drops with textures scaled using TEXTUREx. Would HIRESTEX be faster or are they just the same?

It didn't used to do this before. I'm testing this with textures that are only scaled twice (so 256x256 textures are scaled to 128x128 to fit a wall).

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 12:48

Are you warping some of the large textures? Warping a 256x256 texture is a very expensive operation and should be avoided at all costs.

YouTube · Post by **Nash** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 17:06

No, I'm not warping them.

My specs:

AMD Athlon XP 1.6 GHz
512 MB SDRAM
GeForce 4 MX 440 128 MB

The odd thing is, a 1024 x 1024 wall texture doesn't slow things down, but looking down at a 256x256 floor does. o_O They are both in the same room.

Also, what's a good format for high res textures? The PNG format is overkill when it comes to file size. JPEG is nice but the compression artifacts can be ugly sometimes, plus it doesn't support transparency.

I want to know what is a nice format that can compress like JPEG, as lossless as possible (I can tolerate with small artifacts) and supports transparency.

Syfo-Dyas · Post by **Syfo-Dyas** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 17:19

I've noticed this too, but with hi-res sky boxes. It seems like no matter if I am using my dual 533 Celeron machine or my 1ghz AMD system, when ever I enter a room with a Sky box, the computer freezes for a few seconds, then lets me continue.

YouTube · Post by **Nash** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 17:26

I found the problem. It seems reflective floors and ceilings cause major slowdown regardless of sector size. I tested with a reflective 32x32 sector and the FPS dropped a lot.

I'm talking of an FPS drop like from 60 FPS to 20 FPS.

When I removed the reflective floor, it maintains a 60 FPS. Even with 1024 x 1024 textures.

Is there any way to speed up the reflective floor/ceiling code?

Syfo-Dyas · Post by **Syfo-Dyas** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 18:36

I'm not even using reflective surfaces.

Alter · Post by **Alter** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 19:17

That explains why sapphire is slow for me

YouTube · Post by **Nash** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 19:21

What graphics card are you using? OpenGL apps normally perform better with good graphics cards in combination with a good processor.

Syfo-Dyas · Post by **Syfo-Dyas** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 20:09

Ya Sapphire crawls most the way through.

Was pretty fun though!

As for my GFX cards. I have a

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Mx with 64Mb RAM

and

Radeon 9100 Pro 128 Mb RAM

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 21:15

@Nash:

You are using a rather old graphics card which has lousy stencil buffer performance. But to render a reflective floor I have to use a stencil. So in addition to rendering everything twice you get the additional overhead from bad stencil performance so the result isn't too surprising.

I noticed similar (albeit not quite as bad) slowdowns when I was still using a Geforce FX5900.

As for Sapphire, that has indeed some places which even bring down my P4 3.2 MHz with a Geforce 6800 down to less than 40 fps.

YouTube · Post by **Nash** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 21:25

I've recently (just a few hours ago actually) purchased an ATI Radeon 9550 AGP from a friend for a very cheap price. I figured I'd try this out, plus it's got pixel shader support and stuff.

Anyway, upon installing it and the latest ATI drivers (9.6), Windows wouldn't even start at all.

Does it have anything to do with power supply? I have a 230v power supply...

YouTube · Post by **Nash** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 3:25

Gahhhh!

After SIX hours of trying to get that piece of crap ATI card to work... I've concluded that ATI SUCKS. This will be the first and last time I'll EVER use an ATI.

So, how was my precious time, which I can never get back, spent? Downloading each and every god damn driver version just to see which one would work, trying an uncountable amount of BIOS and driver combinations, countless restarts and safe mode boots, and an empty stomache and bulging eyes from lack of sleep.

And after all that - it still won't work! And that, my friends, was how I pointlessly spent six hours of my life that I will never get back ever again!

Piece of shit... mumble mumble...

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 8:28

I'd rather guess that the card is broken. ATI may be bad but not that bad.

Alter · Post by **Alter** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 10:41

ATI not sucks just your video card is broken! I have my 9600 2 years now and it works fine with latest drivers

Syfo-Dyas · Post by **Syfo-Dyas** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 22:03

The only cards of mine that usually give me crap are my NVIDIA's and that's only because they broke backwards support in there drivers for old games.

Radeon has pretty much always worked fine for me since they picked up on the slack they had with drivers years ago.