RE: Croquet speed

Hmmm, I'm being accused of not knowing what smooth means! I've played my
fair share of FPS games and flight sims and I _do_ know smooth. Let me
elaborate a bit on the qualitative analysis and quote framerates
reported by Croquet. On starting platform, if the portals are not open,
the framerate is about 49 fps as I move forwards, backwards and spin
around. With portals open, I do see the update rate become irregular and
drop as I spin around and have the various open portals pass my field of
view. The framerate drops for a split second to around 18 fps and then
immediately goes up when there are fewer open portals in view. Inside
the portals, the mars rover scene for example, the framerate is 25-50
fps depending on the direction I'm looking. On the average I'd say it
would be in the high 30's. The mountain scene with the ruins varies from
about 20 to 49 fps averaging about 28-30 fps. When I have a project in a
window occupying my whole field of view - the framerate is pretty low -
about 12-16 fps when I drag windows and the other morphs around and
about 18 fps when scrolling the panes in the package browser. The
overall feel there, though, is that 2D Squeak feels somewhat smoother
than it did with my previous system - a dual Celeron 530 MHz
(overclocked speed :-) ) system with an old 16 MB TNT2 Pro. I actually
had the Geforce4 running about 20-30% faster, but somehow I managed to
slow it down by playing with various driver versions. 

My cpu, is actually an 1800 Athlon XP overclocked to 1900 - the actual
clock rate is about 1.53 GHz and this is probably equal to about a P4 at
around 2GHz. I'm running Windows XP with SP1 at 1600x1200x32bit. Just to
compare, I tried running Croquet at work on my P4 1.8GHz with the same
amount of RAM (1 gig) and a cheapo 32 MB TNT2 Vanta - bottom of the
barrel in the Nvidia line -running at 1280x1024x16bit. Well, the
framerate - don't know if you could actually call it that - was probably
about 1 frame per 7 or so seconds and it killed my system in terms of
cpu utilization. I mean it felt very very sluggish. 

My Geforce4 is overclocked to 315MHz for the core clock and 600MHz for
the memory clock (actually it's only 300 MHz, but I guess since it's DDR
memory it's reported at double the rate) from the default 250 and 513MHz
for the core and memory clocks respectively. This probably brings it to
about the same speed as a stock 4400 or 4600. I've also used RivaTuner
to convert it into a Quadro4 to some degree (some features are still not
quite the same due to the Geforce4's using some additional methods to
block this conversion) - when SoftQuadro4 will be released I should be
able to have pretty much a Quadro4 700 XGL for the el cheapo price of
$212 CAD. In any case, it's pretty clear to me that the video card is
very important here and I don't think the lesser Geforces let alone the
poor 5 generation old TNT2's are adequate, but at this price why would
you get anything else than a 4 today. The ATI cards based on the 9700
chip would probably be even better than the Geforce4 cards, but they are
quite a bit pricier and I don't know how good the OpenGL drivers are.

If you don't have the right video card - don't try Croquet, you'll feel
unjustifiably disappointed. OK so I overclocked my card and made it
equal to a card costing $60 CAD more, but that's still only $170 US. 

For anyone trying to get things going, feel free to email me regarding
any video card driver setup/overclocking issues you might have.

Cheers,
Adrian




-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:squeak-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joshua
'Schwa' Gargus
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 3:27 PM
To: squeak-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Croquet speed


On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 03:05:09PM -0500, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> I've been seeing things like that guy with the 1.9ghz Athlon and 
> Geforce4ti 4200 card talk about talk about how fast and smooth croquet

> is.
> 
> I just dropped it on a dual 2.4GHz Xeon machine with a gig of dual 
> channel RDRAM (I'm not sure what that means, I just use the machine, 
> didn't research and buy it) with a Quadro4 700XGL video card, and 
> Croquet feels rather slow and sluggish.  I didn't see anyway to turn 
> on a FPS counter, but subjectively I'd say it was running between 12 
> and 18 frames per second.  Does that sound at all normal to other 
> peoples expectations?  This machine is running Windows 2000 
> Professional.

It runs a bit slower than that for me on a laptop with a GeForce4 and a
2GHz Pentium IV.  That seems quite in line with what you're seeing. When
someone says "fast and smooth", they're comparing it to what they
previously thought possible in Squeak, not to Quake 3.  Keep in mind
that Croquet is not even in a beta state yet.

> 
> Also, I noticed when running the task manager in the background that 
> Croquet doesn't appear to make any use of the 2nd processor, even when

> doing that large amount of data loading and conversion at the 
> beginning.  It seems it would make sense to thread that part of the 
> job at least.

The Squeak VM current only utilizes a single processor.

Joshua


> 
> --
> Joshua D. Boyd