Debugging Performance

General discussion about anything related to Transcendence.
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george moromisato
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Joined: Thu Jul 24, 2003 9:53 pm
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Clear Air Turbulence wrote:I was wondering if anybody else has experienced any performance problems?
You might try running with the /debugVideo command-line parameter. It won't help, but it might identify the cause of the slowdown. With this option, the top of the screen will show three variables:

Frames: The number of frames per second that the game is running at. 30 frames per second is the target. Anything less than that means that the game is running slower than intended.

Paint: This is the number of milliseconds that it takes for the game to draw all the objects. This will increase as the number of objects on the screen increase.

Blt: The time it takes to output to the graphics card (in milliseconds). If this is high (> 10) then it means that the graphics card may be too slow. Running with the /windowed will generally increase this time.

Update: The time it takes for the game to update all the objects (AI, collision detection, etc.) in milliseconds. This is generally <= 4. If it is too much greater than that, then it means that there are a lot of objects to deal with.

I have a pretty fast machine (2.8GHz) with a good graphics card (RADEON X600) so my numbers in Eridani are:

Paint: 1-2
Blt: 2 (windowed)
Update: 0-1

Obviously in nebulae, etc, they will be worse:

Paint: 3-4
Blt: 2 (windowed)
Update: 1-2

And in heavy combat:

Paint: 2-3
Blt: 2 (windowed)
Update: 4-5
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