Performance problems due to high RAM consumption

Domarius · Post by **Domarius** » Mon Apr 26, 2004 5:12 am

Niko, what do you think about this?

Caecus wrote:Irrlicht also does nasty stuff to md2's. Check out hellow world example it uses over 20 megs of memory for a 500k file.

The reason behind this is irrlicht is storing full vertex coords basicalyl for every frame (along with normals). The md2 format itself cuts out a lot of this and uses scalers and such to make each vert only 3 bytes. Irrlichts verts end up being more like 20 I think.

niko · Post by **niko** » Mon Apr 26, 2004 5:29 pm

I know the problem with the md2 files, but it has not that much priority for me. [I am focusing on .x files, you know

]

Domarius · Post by **Domarius** » Tue Apr 27, 2004 4:38 am

Oh okay - I didn't realise the problem was specific to different file formats, cause the original post is about 3DS, and then I saw that post about MD2, and then Homer reported the same problem when using the X format.

So does this involve you optimising the 'usage' for each file format, till they don't take up so much memory? Man, that sounds like a lot of work.

But all we'd need are X files, right? I haven't been working with them before, but from what I gather from this forum, they can do everything (vertex animation, multiple textures...)

AssiDragon · Post by **AssiDragon** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 11:07 am

I don't know if fits nicely here, but I think it's related to this problem.

I wonder if only I have this problem, but IrrLicht makes some strange slowdowns.

Tutorial 9 (about FXs and shadows) runs at 24 FPS and makes the whole PC run slowdownish - even Winamp starts skipping if it's playing in the background.

If I have the media Quake3 map loaded in and running around with the media Quake modell (Sydney) around, it gives a stable 54FPS with 800x600x32 resolution, both on OpenGL and DX9 - which isn't too much considering it's an empty map with one modell running around, no shadows, no anything such...

Is this just my PC, or something to do with the engine?

EDIT: forgot to post my specs, lol... P4-1.8GHZ, Geforce4GO, 256MB DDR RAM. I figure should be sufficient but who knows. :S

warui · Post by **warui** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 2:55 pm

Strange. On my Athlon XP 2000+ with GF4 Ti4200 64MB and 512MB DDR RAM FPS in this tutorial doesn't drop below 100 even with WinAmp, The Bat! and some other aps running in the background.

What GF4 do you have exacly. Ti or MX ?

AssiDragon · Post by **AssiDragon** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 5:59 am

It's a laptop - it has Geforce4GO, a 32MB graphics card. For reference, NFS:Underground runs dreamfast with all settings beefed to maximum...

EDIT: I'm going to give Ogre3D a try and see what FPS it does.

Electron_ · Post by **Electron_** » Mon May 24, 2004 4:07 pm

Maybe your horrible performance (54 fps on an empty map, I get about 140-200) is due to only 32 megs on your graphics card, given Irrlicht's large memory usage (and 256 system ram). I've got 512 megs system ram and a Radeon 8500 (128 megs). BTW my CPU is slower 1.6GHz P4

Tyn · Post by **Tyn** » Mon May 24, 2004 6:08 pm

AssiDragon wrote:For reference, NFS:Underground runs dreamfast with all settings beefed to maximum...

With damn good shader algorithms with some bloody good textures

Domarius · Post by **Domarius** » Tue May 25, 2004 7:50 am

Yeah well, comparing Irrlicht, an all rounder engine, made by one guy, as a hobby in his spare time, to a commercial engine, focused on a specific game type, made by a team of proffessionals who are being paid to do so, is pretty pointless.

What IS a good bench mark, is that my 'crappy' computer, doesn't experience any speed drop when running the FX demo, compared to the other examples. I can't quote exact frame rates off the top of my head, but they didn't vary much from project to project. 70 fps in the tech demo I think.
P3-450, GeForce2 64mb, 384mb RAM.

Homer · Post by **Homer** » Wed Jun 02, 2004 5:57 pm

Ok, I think I've figured out the main problem. It was so obvious that I haven't thougt of it yet

. The most of our textures were 1024x1024x24 pixels big, which means that every texture needed about 3 MBytes of RAM. I've shrinked these textures down to 512x512 and the program now only needs 190 MBytes, which is a minus of 140 MBytes. I think now it should also run on pc's with "only" 256 MBytes of RAM and because of this very important change I'm going to upload the new version till tomorrow evening. Another positive aspect of the new solution is that the loading time is rather shorter now. Puuh, that was an annoying problem with a very simple solution

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 1:36 pm

how many 1024x1024 24bits were u loading, out of curiosity...

Homer · Post by **Homer** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 3:33 pm

vermeer wrote:how many 1024x1024 24bits were u loading, out of curiosity...

about 30

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 4:09 pm

wOOooOOah!!!

hehe, see, I was like working for making a game with people in c++, and tehy were very pro at that...welll...I remember a texture of whole scnery (we used to put all textured like smashed in a single one of all objects and walls, etc, so is better for performance, les surfaces, less texture files....) of about 2048...it was killling a lot of th eperformance...tru the level was like 100k tris or more, but...

Well UT2k3 uses 1024 textures, but if I remember well it uses a loss format for those...and of course, lods sytems, many ways tro compensate....

30...and surely at a time...that was tooo much

also...avoid many meshes, weld physically as much vertex as you can , try to make it all a single piece... fewer surfaces, best performance, at same polycount...