Performance help (Windows 7 32bit)

DavidInvenio

Greetings kind folks of the Doomsday community!

I last used DE and my preferred game jHeretic at version 1.9.9 which I know is quite out of date! That version runs fine on my Windows 7 32bit computer (the hardware is Athlon64 3200+ 2.02ghz cpu, 4gb ram, and SATA hd at 7k rpm). I know it's old and out of date DE v1.9.9 works fine but I tried upgrading to 1.15.5 and performance has degraded to a point of unusability. My graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 and I have DirectX 11. I do not know if this card can do OpenGL 2.0 hardware acceleration, which I read in the docs DE requires.

I also read that DE requires DirectX 8 - or newer - I am assuming 11 will work.
I don't know a thing about OpenGL, but I have not installed anything in terms of drivers or supporting software.

I am hoping I can stay current and move to DE 2.0 but as of yet can't even figure out how to run a game with it! (:|

I've been searching for tips regarding performance and to see if I'm doing something wrong. I know my hardware is old, so if I just don't have the horsepower for the latest DE that's ok although sad!

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated!

Long live DE!
And THANK YOU Team-DE and SkyJake! That's a lotta years to stick with it and keep improving a great idea!

/D

DavidInvenio

I've been trying to locate & upload my doomsday.out file but it doesn't exist!
Am I doing something wrong?

John

I use Windows 7 too and my Doomsday.out file is located at:

C:\Documents\Doomday Frontend\runtime\Doomsday.out

Hope this helps.

skyjake

Assuming that it's the video card whose performance is subpar, there are a couple of things that are worth trying:

1. Disable antialiasing in Video Settings, if it's enabled.
2. For a baseline, try going to the Renderer Settings dialog and selecting the "Vanilla" appearance. This will disable all fancy graphics tricks and should tell you how much the performance can be increased.
3. Assuming that improved things, select the Default profile and then Duplicate it via the dropdown menu. You can give the duplicated profile any name you like, e.g., "Optimized". Now select Edit in the dropdown menu. This will pop up a sidebar with an array of renderer settings.
4. In the recent versions, the biggest perf hit comes from the Bloom effect. If your GPU has a low fillrate, this will cause performance to drop. You can try disabling Bloom under the "Camera Lens" group in the sidebar.
5. You may also try to apply some Pixel Doubling (e.g., 2.0) which will both improve performance due to lower resolution and give a nice pixelated old-timey appearance.
6. While the sidebar is open, you can continue playing the game to see if the settings have any effect.
7. When done, click the big "X" icon in the top right corner of the sidebar.

DavidInvenio

Wow do I ever feel like a newbie again! :-)
I am learning about the new DE and the UI and WOW it's incredible! Great work mate! A beautiful interface and yet seemingly unlimited as to what you can do with it! I've been a software engineer for 31+ years and this is some of the nicest work I've seen!

Now to the task at hand...
1: I did that and also switched to a window instead of full screen
2: Did this - and YES - performance increased dramatically!!!
3: Did this
4: I didn't really notice much change from Bloom off or on - and even with it on, the performance is still pretty good now! Very nice that you can tweak while running the game!
5: Didn't notice much change with this but I'll play with it a little more.
6: Awesome feature!!!

I think I have pretty good performance now, so I'll try out the .pk3 you uploaded for me and see how that impacts things.

One weird thing I noticed is that normal movement, forward or turning (using the keyboard) - and "running" using the Shift key - seem to be reversed. So just up-arrow goes faster than does shift-up-arrow! I haven't tweaked the configuration at all, this is a new install, so I don't think I did anything.

PostFatal

Just having that pk3 in my addons folder gives me this>

PK3 info error
there was an error in the metadata entry of the addon jhrp+psy-20100928.pk3 in the file \Doomsday\snowberry\addons\jhrp+psy-20100928.pk3.

DavidInvenio

I do hope we can keep the various models/etc that have been created for Heretic. It's my favorite of the games.