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Jan 20, 2004, 5:01am

on 3dmark, my fps go well above 500fps at times, but in AW, a program that
has much fewer polygons in view, not to mention the lack of shadows, pixel
shaders, reflections, and particle effects, I never go above 100. There
should be a way for AW to have more support for the current graphics cards.
It would be nice to go in AW in a dense area at 200 meter visibility, and
get high framerates. I'm assuming this has already been discussed, but I
just want to know why this can't be done.

Jan 20, 2004, 6:06am

Your monitor will only draw a certain number of times per second. If your
video card tries to go faster than that, you will see an ugly artifact on
your
screen called tearing.

Assume your monitor can draw the screen 100 times per second. If your
video card draws the screen 500 times per second, each screen you actually
see will have come from five different frames drawn by the video card. If
you are moving, or if anything else in the scene is moving (or just
changing),
you will see five distinct horizontal strips on the screen. This is called
'tearing'

There is not much point in the video card refreshing your screen faster than
between 60 and 100 times per second. If it is capable of doing so, there are
much better chores it could be tasked with such as rendering completely
different views as might be useful for say cameras, mirrors or possibly
creating streams of animation to use as textures, creating light maps
to simulate shadows, or maybe to render an animated envronment map to
simulate shininess.

Turn collisions off for as much stuff as you can. I doubt that the graphics
are what is killing the frame rate in dense areas.

[View Quote]

Jan 20, 2004, 1:11pm

[View Quote] Ever since AW 3.0 there has been a frame rate throttle that tries to keep
the frame rate under certain number, used to be 50 but they raised it to 100 later.
It was introduced by advice from Criterion, to help certain lag situations
that Voodoo and NVidia cards had at high framerates when using RenderWare.
I don't know if that bug still exists with newer cards and Direct3D versions.
Roland thought about making the throttle user-configurable anyway.

There is also the problem that if the visibility rises too fast, then
there may be sudden pauses when lots of objects come into view
and start downloading and stuffing themselves into memory.
In preprogrammed environments it is easier to predict what is behind next cell.

This would be a nice subject to discuss at TechTalk if they still had those...

--
Mauz
http://mauz.info

Jan 20, 2004, 1:54pm

"ferruccio" <startrek3 at earthlink.net> wrote in
news:400cd25d at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> on 3dmark, my fps go well above 500fps at times, but in AW, a program
> that has much fewer polygons in view, not to mention the lack of
> shadows, pixel shaders, reflections, and particle effects, I never go
> above 100. There should be a way for AW to have more support for the
> current graphics cards. It would be nice to go in AW in a dense area
> at 200 meter visibility, and get high framerates. I'm assuming this
> has already been discussed, but I just want to know why this can't be
> done.

3dmark is the single most known 3D benchmark. The video card manufacturers
work hard to make their cards perform well in it, so don't put so much
trust into the numbers you get it. Anyway, I doubt that an environment
pulling 500fps is completely dynamic like AW. Simple BSP-tree portal
rendering can boost your framerates a lot.

And, as Codewarrior said, there's no point in going above 100fps. It's not
like your eyes will even notice the difference. I don't think any video
cards are capable of that sort of refresh rates, neither are any monitors.

Do you know what framerate a cinema movie plays at? 24. If your framerate
is above 24, shut up and be happy ;-)

KAH

Jan 20, 2004, 9:59pm

but a cinema movie runs differently than a 3d world. a cinema movie blurs
each frame to give the effect of a smooth framerate. In a 3d world, there
is no blurring, so you can see several frames each time the optical nerves
fire off. anyway, I am just talking about improving framerates in general.
I'm not saying that they have to go above 100, but I am saying that they
have to go above 20 at least, in a dense area at 200 meters. and about the
simulation where I got 500 fps, it was fully dynamic, and it had a lot more
polygons than in AW at 200 meters (at gz)

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