The performance of the Spring engine

[Felix the Cat]

For those of you who are real FPS whores, I have a copy of Pong that runs at over 1000 FPS.

(Sure, it locks up your system because it's using 100% of the CPU time. But hey - it's over one thousand!)

[rattle]

There's another big reason why the "24FPS ought to be enough for everybody" myth is quite patentely false. Not only does the spatiotemporal distance between any two successive rendered frames decrease as the framerate increases (which provides a better illusion of continuous motion, since frames are discrete), ...

For a first person shooters perhaps, but in an RTS game?

[Argh]

Um... why are we still arguing about this? None of the people who know what's up with the engine would disagree that Spring could run a lot faster, if it was properly optimized to take advantage of modern hardware, and had the gamecode cleaned up in various places. Just the amount of change that's happened over this last major build has been quite nice, tbh- I suspect that a lot of people will be seeing much better performance in 0.77.

That said, until all of the OpenGL calls are culled from the gamecode and we have a separate renderer for modern hardware, and things like weapons and CEGs are optimized a bit more (for example, we could have CEGs that ran far faster, for GLSL users, if we used a shader method like Trepan demonstrated, not to mention what could be done with maps and model rendering) ... performance on modern hardware is still going to be frustratingly slow.

It's not like nobody knows what's up.

The problem is that fixing it is not something that most of us are qualified to attempt, and the few that are aren't willing to spend the time needed right now (because they're doing other stuff, like fixing bugs, or finishing their engineering degrees), or their work is proceeding very slowly. If you would like to contribute code, and are qualified, by all means, sit down and do it.

Lastly, arguing about stupid crap like framerates of FPS vs. RTS games, is totally silly- framerate is framerate, response time is response time, users are users.

There's no magical difference between playing CS, which involves a mouse and keyboard (I still can't believe I read somebody implying you just use a mouse- they've obviously never played a FPS seriously) just like a RTS- you're a user, you want to interact with the software as fast as your reaction times allow, and you want to see stuff happen in the gameworld as close to "real-time" as possible. Period.

I really cannot believe you guys have wasted 5 pages, and countless man-hours, on something that is so obvious.

[smoth]

some people write long posts which contribute nothing to the thread past saying that everyone in the thread is a moron and regurgitating what was 5 pages of post. Also, if it takes you MAN hours to make a post I suggest you shorten your posts.

[Kloot]

rattle:

Not so much of course, things generally move slow enough
in an RTS (except maybe projectiles) that the frame interval
is short enough even at 30 FPS to be below your perception
threshold (the point at which you start noticing the individual
frames). In that sense I agree more aren't needed, but even
in Spring just moving the camera around will appear jumpy if
the interval is too long relative to the translation, and higher
framerates eliminate (well, suppress) those discontinuities.

[reivanen]

some people write long posts which contribute nothing to the thread past saying that everyone in the thread is a moron and regurgitating what was 5 pages of post. Also, if it takes you MAN hours to make a post I suggest you shorten your posts.

In fact i think argh made one of the best posts in this thread this far...

[smoth]

That was humor for argh and not a serious post.

[AF]

humour should be postfixed with a =p when its not immediately obvious.

[smoth]

ya think?

[Vadi]

=P

[Ixoran]

I still can't believe I read somebody implying you just use a mouse- they've obviously never played a FPS seriously

I was actually referring to the old Joypad V Keyboard & Mouse debate.
OMGZ I has Controller!
WTF KEBOARD AND MOUSE FTW!

Which reminds me, I should configure my gamepad for the Drive unit controls.
Which I'm going to do.

I'm totally done with this thread, almost all of this thread is an off topic flamewar.

Gooday Vadi, I hope I meet you in a better thread next time. =p

[Teutooni]

I guess that is because spring needs alot of raw computing power and memory due to the huge unit numbers ingame, not fancy shader processors etc. You can up the AA as much as you like, the gpu and memory will be the bottlenecks.

I have 3 gigs of ram

Err, I meant your gfx card memory.

[Neddie]

OK, I know people claim that. I simply don't believe it though!

Some simple math such as 50fps = 1 frame every 20ms, 40fps = 1 frame every 25ms, and 5 ms difference is an _awfully_ short time. It's 200th of a second, programs and wikipedia offers a nice comparison of what that means (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond).

I simply don't believe a human eye can tell a difference in 5 ms, sorry!

It's not a consistent thing, but you will notice differences accrue over time. At 30 FPS I will make shots, but the longer I've been playing, the more anomalies I will notice, individual frame shifts in an animation, little jumps of decals. At 40 these are less common, at 50 even less so, and around 60 I lose sight of them almost entirely, though different mental states will affect my optical processing.

[Vadi]

I don't see how that accumulated difference will impact your ability to dodge shots in a single instance. Unless you're playing for 1+ hour straight without any sort of a break, but that's unhealthy

[cong06]

Unless you're playing for 1+ hour straight without any sort of a break, but that's unhealthy

What? You can play video games for increments less then an hour?! =O

[Hobo Joe]

I don't see how that accumulated difference will impact your ability to dodge shots in a single instance. Unless you're playing for 1+ hour straight without any sort of a break, but that's unhealthy

It makes all the difference in the world, trust me. I've been playing FPS games since way back when in the early CS days, and the difference between 30 and 60 is HUUUUGE.


And as for not playing more than one hour....

That's crazy! A single RTS game will often go on longer than that.

[smoth]

I guess that is because spring needs alot of raw computing power and memory due to the huge unit numbers ingame, not fancy shader processors etc. You can up the AA as much as you like, the gpu and memory will be the bottlenecks.

I have 3 gigs of ram

Err, I meant your gfx card memory.

512

[Gota]

The bottleneck is not the gpu.Its the cpu.

[ironized]

lies, i may not be able to see more then 24fps, but i can feel it, and tell its their, im happy with 40-50. but getting 30 when there is no action and 10 when there is heaps is just utter bs.

[SwiftSpear]

I have 1 gig of texture memory. It allows for full quality shadows... but my FPS doesn't peak too high above 40 with my 8800 GT.