Framerate right down in r425

[dajt]

I have been testing an installer based on r425 before posting and have found the framerate has dropped really badly.

I normally get 100 fps, with 50 fps when things get busy.

With this build I'm getting about 30 - 40 fps when leaving a station and sometimes down to 15 fps.

I noticed it immediately. The spinning cobra on the intro screen was obviously not as smooth as it used to be.

Linux people, how does the daily build look?

[winston]

Hmmm. Yes, I'm seeing that too.

I'm also seeing a correlating drop in CPU usage too - so it's like a change was made to simply halve the frame rate and halve the work (normally Oolite uses about 50% of CPU - it's only using around 25% now).

I'm not seeing it go jerky like yours though - it stays at a solid 50fps *all the time* regardless of what's going on (it used to vary between 50 and 100fps). My hardware is a 2GHz P4 with an nVidia GeForce 4200ti (the whole kit is a little over 3 years old)

[winston]

ooh, and I just noticed I've hit the 1000 post mark

[winston]

Weirder and weirder - scratch that - I flew around a bit and am now getting a solid 83 fps (again with a lower than normal CPU usage - now around 35% CPU). I tried the SVN head on my PowerBook. I'm getting 100fps in windowed mode and 50fps in full screen (which seems a bit odd) but no jerkiness at all.

What's your hardware spec?

[dajt]

I have an IBM Thinkpad T41. 1.7GHz processor with 2Gb RAM. The graphics card is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000.

This is the machine I've been using for Oolite development almost from the start, so it isn't like my hardware or OS has changed in the last few days.

I *very rarely* see a high framerate but it is only for a few frames then drops right back down. The performance now around stations is pretty bad and in open space nowhere near what it used to be.

[winston]

Interesting.
I just tried it on my Ubuntu laptop (testing) system. There is no measurable difference in frame rate between 1.62-5 and the latest nightly build, nor is there any difference in CPU usage (the difference in CPU usage on my desktop could possibly because I upgraded it to FC5 and it has new nvidia drivers - new kernel + new OpenGL drivers may have just made it more efficient). I'll have to try booting the FC2 partition and see if there is a discernable difference there.

I've not seen any jerkiness on any of my systems.

[Rubinstein]

I'm on SVN rev 439 (meanwhile I'm pretty confused, so many different versions. I guess the nightly
builds are something else....)

On my low-end system (1Ghz Athlon, GeForce2-Gts) everything's smooth with 50 FPS on average.
Some month ago FPS was higher (~80-100), but also higher CPU load which is now mostly below 30%
and in space usually still keeps below 50%. I like it this way: constant 50 FPS is perfectly ok for me and
while I'm writing this, Oolite is running in a window w/o even being noted.

I'm on gentoo-Linux if it matters...

[winston]

To end your confusion, there are exactly three builds for Linux:

- Stable: This is whatever the latest version Giles released for OS X. The only changes that happen to stable are bugfixes that are important enough to backport. Stable is 1.62 (patch level 5, hence 1.62-5).
- Development: These get released from time to time to allow people who want to be on the leading edge - dev releases should be reasonably stable, but they are development releases so expect to find broken things. They are released as a complete installer, just like stable.
- Nightly: These happen at 4:00am GMT from whatever's in Subversion. They may or may not work. It's for those who want to be on the *bleeding* edge. Available only via rsync. They are labeled with whatever the current version is (say, 1.65-dev2) and the SVN release it was built from (eg 1.65-dev2-440).

[Rubinstein]

To end your confusion, there are exactly three builds for Linux:

Snip and thanks for your thorough explanation, but I'm still confused (or just too stupid):
If the nightly is only available via rsync, where would you place my current SVN version rev 440?
Updates are almost too frequent (on a daily base) for what you described as Development, but on the
other hand can hardly be the same as Nightly since this is only available via rsync, as you said.

[winston]

If the nightly is only available via rsync, where would you place my current SVN version rev 440?

That sounds like your own private build.

[Rubinstein]

If the nightly is only available via rsync, where would you place my current SVN version rev 440?

That sounds like your own private build.

Huh? Not all too long ago that was the "official" way to go with SVN:

Code: Select all

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/oolite-linux

I compile with 'make' in the ~/oolite-linux/trunk folder and start oolite with

Code: Select all

cd ~/oolite-linux/trunk/oolite.app
./oolite

Anyway, I don't complain (works fine for me). I'm just curious.

[winston]

That's what I mean by private build - you downloaded the source via svn and built it yourself, rather than using one of the pre-compiled builds (stable and development from berlios or nightly from rsync). Essentially, if you use svn you're not guaranteed to be synced up with any particular build that I do unless you happened to update to the specific svn release that I'm using.

Essentially, then, you're running 1.65-dev2-440. (The nightly build script pulls the version number from the Autopackage default.apspec file, and then appends the SVN revision to the end). If you're running r440, then (so long as you've not made any source changes to your own working copy), you're running the nightly build. (The nightly build is really for those who want to be on the bleeding edge but don't have a build environment. It's also an automated way to shake out build breaks that otherwise may not get noticed for a while - I get emailed a build report every day courtesy of cron).

[Rubinstein]

Sorts it out for me, thanks a lot!