More Information
Okay, I did some more more testing today.
1. The 6-10 build
overall framerates a bit faster than on previous builds, but the problems remain (though the white square thingy seems to be pretty much fixed). The difference bewteen normal and d3dbadtsys got smaller. Now both ways lock up if I use the external camera to watch multiple ships (see below). The average FPS with the normal rendering is 0,2 FPS better than with -d3d_bad_tsys, but has a lot more hanging and stuttering.
Also, 'new' in this build, is the bug where any glows (thruster glows) suddenly get incredibly huge and go about 500% of their normal size, and then swap back immediately. Missiles tend to get rather messy too.
Another thing I noticed, is that without "d3d_badtsys" there seem to be glitches with background musics being played (namely: The game chose a wrong briefing music). With d3d_bad_tsys the right music was chosen and played.
2. The problems
I ran through all this with -stats and -timerbar to analyse where the problem seems to be coming from. I discovered some really interesting things.
Problem1: External camera
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If I switch to external camera with a bit of fighting behind me, the framerate will instantly drop to x.x values and stay there. Sometimes the textures of ships (mostly the player ship) will whiten out.
TIMERBAR says: 10 complete red lines, 5 complete blue lines, 12 dark red lines, 13 black lines + some tiny snippets (green, pink, etc)
STATS: What came to my attention almost instantly is that the free texture memory (normally really small values such as 3 or 7) was relatively large while it was hanging, namely at 88 MB. (from 128 MB memory on my vid card, mind you). This value kept fluttering around (hard to see at 4 FPS) around this value.
Problem2: Hanging during gameplay
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If textures come into my screen, the game will sometimes hang for a short time, and then go on normally. Note that this wont happen only once, so the same texture can make me hang twice. This also happens if ships explode, or just randomly while i'm turning around.
TIMERBAR says:
a) Lots of dark red lines.
b) Lots of black lines
c) Some blue lines
A and B can happen seperately (i.e. only dark red, or only black). Some stutters also seem to have a lot of bright red lines in it.
STATS: While I kept watching the stats I noticed that everytime the game slows down to one of the hangs there was a lot of texture memory freed. The Texture memory free went from 5 MB to around 30 MB in most cases. (the other memory consumption was not changed in any way). After the hanger, it was back at 5 MB. I *think* the hanging is produced by the fact that the game reloads some textures unneccessarily - An object comes into your FOV, the game trashes the textures it has ALREADY loaded for it, and then reloads them (leading to the hanging). Whatever happens, vid card memory is freed and filled immediately afterwards every time the hangings occur.
Problem 3: Explosion hanger
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Even with retail explosions the game seems to slow down to 5 FPS sometimes (some other times it doesnt affect my FPS *at all*.). This seems to occur randomly when something explodes.
TIMERBAR says: 57+ complete black lines, 3 complete blue lines, 1 red line. Sometimes the red lines flicker up and grow to about 20 red lines - this doesn't happen every time it hangs on an explosion.
STATS: Nothing unusual, everything stays about the same as far as I could see.
Side note: For some reason, FS2 SCP seems to be consuming 1400+ MB of memory. This is a bit.... much, isn't it?
