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[Black Hound]

Thanks a ton, Lightman, that worked for my computer too.

[Veroule]

The next version has an adjustment to seperate the redraw FPS from the game FPS.  Which will allow a finer control over just how fast the game goes.  Driver problems like what the original poster mentioned will still occur though.

Also if I recall correctly Toady did something to handle the VSynch issue.  The VSynch basically causes the redraw to sit waiting for the right moment.  It matches the redraws to the refresh rate of your monitor which is easily locatable by looking at the display properties.

The remaining speed issues with DF are largely optimizations.  As DF is still in an alpha status I really don't expect much in the way of optimizations.  I will likely propose a bunch though after the next version comes out.  In my opinion some of the behaviors need to be rethought, and there are a few things that can be done much faster with only a small increase in memory usage.  Those will be the kinds of things I will target for optimization suggestions.

Full screen is faster because the video card is actually doing a lot less work.  Dropping the video redraw will make a difference as well.  You can look at my post of the SpeedDF patch to get an idea.

I never went ahead and made the next version because I thought Toady would release his next version sooner.  I however play with a hard coded version of my patch and can say that when the game side of things pushes the FPS to 15 FPS then changing the graphics redraw from 15 FPS to 2 FPS doesn't make much difference.

So after the next version of DF is out I will be focused on trying to figure out where optimizations can be made so that game side FPS stays much higher.

[Lightman]

quote:Originally posted by Veroule:
<STRONG>Full screen is faster because the video card is actually doing a lot less work.  Dropping the video redraw will make a difference as well.  You can look at my post of the SpeedDF patch to get an idea.</STRONG>

Actually in full-screen mode the video card is doing MORE of the work, which is why it is usually an advantage and frees up CPU time. It usually makes a difference for graphics-intensive applications and applications where video timing is crucial. It also eliminates the need for bit-depth conversion, which can slow applications down (assuming that source and destination are the same bit-depth). I still think it's noteworthy that full-screen made a difference when the game is doing so little, graphics-wise. Regardless, the main issue is that the 3D rendering settings have a substantial impact on performance. This is something people should be aware of when playing the game and I would guess quite a few are not. I am also curious why 3D settings have that impact. It leads me to think that there might be something DF could do to stop any useless functions from operating on its graphics display. All it needs to do is a stright blit, at most with an alpha channel.

[Eagle of Fire]

DF don't do much computation graphic wise, the strain come from all the objects laying around. Every object add a tiny piece of ressource strain on the computer, and after a while that's why the game come to an halt.

The real reason why fullscreen take less power to run is because when you use the window mode in Windows, the computer must not only compute the game computations but also calculate the transposition of the fullscreen graphics to the window mode, which take way, way more power.

What I'd like to know is why is the game always taking 100% of my CPU power even when idle (paused). This look and sound strange for me...

[Lightman]

quote:Originally posted by Eagle of Fire:
<STRONG>DF don't do much computation graphic wise, the strain come from all the objects laying around. Every object add a tiny piece of ressource strain on the computer, and after a while that's why the game come to an halt.

The real reason why fullscreen take less power to run is because when you use the window mode in Windows, the computer must not only compute the game computations but also calculate the transposition of the fullscreen graphics to the window mode, which take way, way more power.

What I'd like to know is why is the game always taking 100% of my CPU power even when idle (paused). This look and sound strange for me...</STRONG>

You're missing the point. That the graphics is a small task is why the impact of 3D settings should not affect it. Also, "transposing" the graphics in windowed mode? What do you mean? The computer doesn't transpose "fullscreen graphics" to do a windowed mode. The graphics are blitted the same, either way. There might be a savings if another task is not painting updates or (again) if you need to convert to the screen bit-depth, but that seems unlikely.

For the CPU usage, I'd say to try checking your 3D settings and driver.

[Kaivosukeltaja]

My system is a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM and a 256MB Radeon 9600 Pro. DF used to run at a pretty constant 10fps on my computer, even when paused or in the main menu, keeping the processor usage at 100% all the time. After I upgraded the drivers to the newest version of Catalyst and disabled VSync in the Catalyst control board, the framerate instantly jumped to 100 when paused (limit in init file) and around 30 in my 6th year fortress with 130 dwarves and a crapload of animals running around the corridors. It was like they were all on speed.

I haven't tried the Omega drivers myself, but I know at least Catalyst solves the issue. The original poster's machine should have no trouble reaching 50 fps even in a high population fortress.