Performance Difference when irrEdit is Open

fuego2008 · Post by **fuego2008** » Fri Sep 26, 2008 10:55 pm

Hi!

I have recently upgraded my irrLicht projects from VC6 & irrLicht 1.4 to VC.Net 2008 Express & irrLicht 1.4.2 as some of you know. I have seen that when irrEdit is open in the background, my application's performance boosts and everything becomes displayed amazingly faster. But when I shutdown irrEdit and run my app again, everything goes in the turtle speed.

I am using realistic water, 16 meshes under 1K polygons and there is no lighting in the scene except the ambient. I want my app to work very fast like when there is irrEdit running in the background. What could be the problem? Or what information else should I provide for you to get an idea about the problem?

Great thanks for taking your time and reading this

fuego2008 · Post by **fuego2008** » Sat Sep 27, 2008 8:21 am

I have found that my system was slowed down because of texture filters I have applied. For a strange reason, filters work fast when app is not in fullsreen mode or when irrEdit is working in the background, but what it switches to fullscreen, filters mess up in my app. I don't know why. I have written it here for reference of future programmers who might engage the same problem. Thanks anyway...

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Sat Sep 27, 2008 3:27 pm

Cool thanks for finding this. What graphics card and drivers are you using? Also which texture filtering settings are you using? I'm guessing you're using D3D9 to render the scene?

wyrmmage · Post by **wyrmmage** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 1:16 am

I've heard of a similar thing happening when people open up Windows Media Player and then run an OpenGL based program like WoW; last I heard it was a bug in Windows that when multi-threaded OpenGL is run and the thread status is set to higher than normal it leaks over into any other apps that are running OpenGL. No idea whether IrrEdit does anything like this, but sounds kind of similar

-wyrmmage

night_hawk · Post by **night_hawk** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 9:41 am

Here's a funny situation aswell: my app runs with, say, 4 fps on someone's PC and 40 fps on the same PC if it has Paint running in the same time. I couldn't believe it when I heard it

fuego2008 · Post by **fuego2008** » Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:41 pm

bitplane wrote:Cool thanks for finding this. What graphics card and drivers are you using? Also which texture filtering settings are you using? I'm guessing you're using D3D9 to render the scene?

After finding this, strange thing continued to happen, but I believe I will be able to find more things about this sbuject. Yes bitplane, I have tried to use D3D9 for rendering. For some reason, when Direct3D based background apps tries to reinitialize Direct3D device, both apps get faster. This seems much like not related IrrLicht but a Windows-specific issue, but if I can develop the correct strategy, I may find some way to improve D3D9 performance.

When I run the same app in OpenGL mode, the problem is the filtering issue, like I said in my final post. Also bitplane you want to read my machine spec. Here are them:

Quad Core AMD Phenom 9600 (with CPU erratum issue fixed from BIOS)
GeForce 8600GT 1GB Graphics Adapter
Windows XP Service Pack 2
750 GB HDD with >500GB Free
2GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM
Visual Studio .Net 2008 Express Edition
IrrLicht Version 1.4.2

Filtering: I have generated trees from TreeMagik in Low Poly mode. Each tree is about 500 polygons. I use ALPHACH_REF mode for braches, and when I apply them trilinear+ bilinear+ anisotropic (whatever name is) filter, performance slows down very much when camera displays these trees. You may view a screenshot from my work:

http://fuego2008.0catch.com/

When the camera displays the trees (like the one in the bottom right corner), overall performance gets very very low in OpenGL when filtering is on. I will post more info as soon as I find new things about this topic.

Thanks for taking you time and reading this