[Turey]

I tried to play FSOpen 3.6.9 RC7 today, and it was running at 8 fps, where it normally runs at 60fps (OpenGL, patched 3.6.8 zeta's, no adveffects, high quality in options).

it took me a good half hour to figure out what was wrong.

aparently, in order to save power, my laptop throttles back the graphics card when the battery power falls below 50%. unfortunately, it doesn't throttle it back UP when power goes above 50%. One of the effects of throttling it back is to use 16-bit color instead of 32-bit color.

My FSOpen is configured to send the graphics card 32-bit color frames.

i lost 52fps because my grapics card was constantly converting from 32-bit to 16-bit color.

would there be any way to prevent this?

maybe force FSOpen to use whatever color depth the graphics card specifies that it is running at?

maybe have the launcher force the graphics card to run in the specified color depth?

I don't know what's possible, i've never done graphics coding at all, much less OpenGL.

[taylor]

OpenGL will run at what ever color depth you set in the Launcher.  The only case where that isn't so is when your desktop is 16-bit and you try to run the game at 32-bit.  In that case the game will try to use 32-bit, but it will automatically fail down to 16-bit if needed.  Having the card convert from 32-bit to 16-bit color won't lose you 52fps.  It probably wouldn't even be noticable, since it's done at level load and not throughout the mission.  That wasn't where your speed drop was coming from.

Doing 32-bit to 16-bit conversion wouldn't be done in order to save power anyway, there would be no power-saving benefit to such an action.  The clock speed of the GPU/video-RAM may drop, but that's about it.  More than likely your CPU power cut in half, if not more, which is why you had the big speed drop.  If that wasn't the case (which it was, but connecting to a power outlet should have restored full speed) then there is something else wrong with your setup which caused the problem.

Knowing what hardware you had would be of help here...

[Turey]

you're probably right, it just started working again when i changed desktop color depth back to 32-bit, idk why.

IBM Thinkpad T30
Win XP Pro SP2
Intel P4m 2.20 Ghz
ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 (16 MB on card)
512 MB Ram
4 GB Virtual Ram


i've never had speed problems before. (At least, not with OpenGL.)