[Grug]

Just wondering, is anyone else experience v. poor performance when selecting ships / weapons before mission launch?

It's been happening for a while now, I don't have the pof cmd on either.
Just plain old .ani's, which is why I'm wondering why it chugs so much when in the Ship selection and weapon selection screens yet the game runs decent enough...

Is this a prob with me or poor ani rendering code or other?

Anyone else had same problems?

[WMCoolmon]

Did it start when I added the 3D selection stuff? Although if you don't have the flag, it should be doing the same stuff as the original.

Edit: Does it get any worse if you use the 3D selection stuff?

[DrunkenPirate]

Kind of sloppy speed for me in the loadout screens when ani's are present, but when it is 3d models instead it is fine.

[taylor]

OGL, D3D, or both?

[Grug]

Hmm well I just did some testing.
Its with OGL only, D3D is fine.

I'm fairly sure its the way the ani's are being drawn because with the ship model code on, the ship selection screen is fine.
But the Weapon screen is still sluggish because it still has an ani.
Both are sluggish without the ship selection code.

OGL has got a few bugs at the moment, most notable being the above, vbo (which took me a while to figure out), and also the preload screens not working when you boot up the game. Rather than showing the jpg or whatever, it shows whatever was last displayed in OGL, which ranges from a crash in FS2 or even another OGL game.

[Galemp]

This is a known bug, as far as I know.

[taylor]

Originally posted by Grug
Its with OGL only, D3D is fine.

What video card and driver version are you using?  The VBO problems should actually be fixed as long as you are using a relatively recent build (since early Feburary).  ANIs (ones like briefing anis and talking head animations) are drawn a bit differently than normal graphics for speed reasons (and upcoming features).  There was a bug, since fixed, that could cause this to be unordinarily slow.  Also it's possible that your video card or drivers is just having a negative reaction to this change which is something that I've seen before.  It's normally much faster but some crappy drivers can have issues.  There are a few things I can do to help fix this so I can get you a special test build if you want to try a some things out.

The preload screen issue and the thing with popups is something that I'm working on.  There are Windows only problems and the popup issue seems to be a bigger problem for ATI cards than any others.

[Grug]

There is a high posibility it is my drivers actually.

I have an ATI Radeon9600 -one of the crappy ones unfortunatly.

But I'm using the Omega Drivers based on the 4.12 Catalyst beta.
I might actually update and revoke back to the latest official drivers.

Will update when this happens. As with the VBO problem, I spent all last night going from the official 356 release and through all the latest builds in the recent builds thread, trying to get FS2 to work, after I updated the MediaVP's.

But yeah, once I get the latest drivers I will see if the same issues remain, otherwise I might have to switch back to D3D...

Update
Well Looks like I've got a few options:
- New Omega Drivers based on the Catalyst 5.1 drivers
- Official Catalyst 5.2 drivers
- Official Catalyst 5.2 drivers w/ Control Center

Out of curiosity, which would you recommend?
Omega are designed for performance (which I'd prefer ) but with 5.2 which is better, the drivers with or without the control center, why is it worth getting?

[DrunkenPirate]

I don't like the CCC plus you need the .NET framework files for that to even work. I am using the standard 5.2 drivers now with no problems.
This is with OGL Taylor.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by taylor
The preload screen issue and the thing with popups is something that I'm working on.  There are Windows only problems and the popup issue seems to be a bigger problem for ATI cards than any others.

I'm using a GF6600GT and have the same popup issue. However, I think it's triggered by some command line parameter (Other than switching to D3D, as in OGL it's fine), maybe pcx32. I'll try to find out.

[Grug]

I've updated my drivers with the new Omega ones, but the same issue remains.
With the model code on it works fine in the ship selection screen. But in the weapon selection screen where there is still an animation, it starts to chug.

D3D works fine however.

So any ideas on what this might be?

Update: BTW, I think it is only occuring in the weapon and ship selectino screens, the briefing and tech room menu's work ok.

Update2: There actually is still a decrease in performance in the techroom animations etc, except its not as noticable as the weapon ones. Possibly because they are smaller?

[WMCoolmon]

How much memory do you guys have? And does -pcx2dds (compress images or something, in the gameplay command line options) have an effect?

[Grug]

768mb of ram, and with or without the pcx2dds its the same deal.

With D3D working fine, I would think its something broken in the OGL stuff.

[taylor]

OGL ignores -pcx2dds so that's not going to be any help here.

@Grug:  I'll come up with a build for you sometime tomorrow or the next day (depends on how busy I am).  I'll PM you the link so keep an eye out for it.  This build will have the performance optimization disabled so that it works the old way.  I need this optimization for future things so it's not going to be disabled in CVS or any other builds.  It will tell us for sure whether this is your problem though since this particular bit of code only applies to anims.  If so then I'll know what to try and work around.

[Grug]

Mmk, thanks.