CPU Performance Questions

DavidInvenio

Some time back I tried DE 2.0 (with jHRP) using full-screen and had performance problems that seemed at the time to be video related. After some testing with older versions and non-full-screen the problem seemed to go away. As of late I've been testing custom PWads with DE 1.15 as I'm considering making a public searchable database for the DE Heretic community.

As I did some testing with various wads and settings in DE, by chance alone I found out that the DE executable was chewing up my CPU and that's what was causing the problem - NOT the graphics stuff (altho they may be related of course). I also found, not surprisingly that some wads ran just fine and some were unplayable.

Now most of the wads I test are NOT created specifically for DE, so obviously I realize this could be a problem. HOWEVER - my initial testing was using the default Heretic.wad(registered) and that causes the CPU usage issue as well.

My CPU is AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.02ghz (old and crusty I understand)
I have 4gb ram - using Windows 7 Ultimage
I do NOT run any other apps while I'm using DE and have VERY minimal things in the background.

So my question is - can I do any fine-tuning of DE to help with the performance?

Any enlightenment to help me learn about DE would be greatly appreciated!!!

skyjake

Which maps specifically are showing high CPU usage? I could take a look in the profiler and see if it's a previously known or some new bottleneck that causing the problem.

Unfortunately when it comes to CPU performance, Doomsday's doesn't really offer much tuning options. If we can pinpoint the bottlenecks, though, there could be some targeted optimizations that would help.

lampshade

I notice on the latest stable build if I load Breach.wad (very detailed maps) it can take minutes to load and playing through I get lower FPS than usual. One of my cores will almost always be near 100% load. It seems the bigger/more complex a map is, the more intense that one core's CPU usage is.

If you ever implement support for multiple threads I wonder if this will go away.

DavidInvenio

skyjake wrote:

Which maps specifically are showing high CPU usage? I could take a look in the profiler and see if it's a previously known or some new bottleneck that causing the problem.

Unfortunately when it comes to CPU performance, Doomsday's doesn't really offer much tuning options. If we can pinpoint the bottlenecks, though, there could be some targeted optimizations that would help.

I'll do some more detailed testing and post my results.

I admit though that I should really just break down and build a whole new box. I hate hardware with a passion

DavidInvenio

lampshade wrote:

I notice on the latest stable build if I load Breach.wad (very detailed maps) it can take minutes to load and playing through I get lower FPS than usual. One of my cores will almost always be near 100% load. It seems the bigger/more complex a map is, the more intense that one core's CPU usage is.

If you ever implement support for multiple threads I wonder if this will go away.

Funny you mention that... I've learned a few things testing, and one of them is that the size of the wad file, the number of maps, complexity of them, and to a large degree the number of monsters - all affect CPU usage greatly. No surprise there I guess! I was just surprised at how much it affected the performance.

I've played with some renderer settings and window sizes with not much luck.

However, again no surprise, as soon as I turned of 3D Models (I use jHRP normally) - CPU usage dropped significantly. A wad that was the worst of all I've tested worked perfectly - just no jHRP :-(

Vermil

DDay is heavilly CPU based. Though the new renderer, as parts of it are added, will probably leverage more of the GPU.