performance drop with SVN Nexuiz

[Ed]

[01:44] <Willis> I was playing around, and no matter what settings (playing with snd_streaming and r_font_hinting) on the second run, performance was fine, meaning even if it is using more cpu, it's not enough that it's cpu bound
[01:54] <LordHavoc> Willis: I've been really tempted to make DP somehow do an automatic twice-run timedemo, reporting time for only the second
[01:55] <Diablo-D3> why?
[01:55] <LordHavoc> because the engine uploads and compiles shaders on first use
[01:55] <LordHavoc> it also uploads lightmaps in q1bsp on first use

vid_restart causes the shaders and lightmaps to be flushed from this cache, hence if you do vid_restart between timedemos, you get the same result as if you restart.

Would it be worth using Phoromatic?
http://www.phoromatic.com/
That way an automated build of each DP engine code revision could be benched via the Nexuiz benchmark in PTS. We'd then have an official measure for performance rather than occasional claims for drops in performance which we can't necessarily depend upon.

This same approach is being done by Phoronix to track performance in the kernel Git repository which should bring payoffs for the whole Linux community.

[fronten]

besides anything my SVN now looks like that :

(http://omploader.org/vMzZicQ/nexuiz000005.jpg)

even with *cleanup* and completely new download 'n' build.

yeah, i am fucked.

[LordHavoc]

besides anything my SVN now looks like that :

Please type this when that problem occurs:
condump whitesurfaces.log

Then upload that somewhere, I'll look at the shader compile errors.

[liberty]

besides anything my SVN now looks like that :

(http://omploader.org/vMzZicQ/nexuiz000005.jpg)

even with *cleanup* and completely new download 'n' build.

yeah, i am fucked.

I have the same problem and caused by GLSL. If I disable GLSL, the problem is gone. But I can't turn off GLSL forever, it will always reset after entering the game. I have once filed a ticket.

[Spaceman]

Can you paste a copy of your game console here, this will give the developer(s) some clues why GLSL is failing.

Open your game console and enter condump fle_name.txt open fle_name.txt with your favourite text editor and copy and the paste the contents here.

[LordHavoc]

Knowing what video card and operating system is used would help also.

It is known to work on NVIDIA and ATI fglrx drivers on Linux, it is known to work on NVIDIA and ATI drivers on Windows, I am less certain about Mac OS X drivers, and Linux Mesa DRI drivers.

We really need that condump output.

[fronten]

for the last months i dropped the whole thing because of no clues whatsoever.

now, i replaced my old Ati Radeon 9200 with an Radeon HD 4850, and ran this tests (SVN vs vanilla 2.5.2) again.

this time, demo002 with ULTRA settings, resulted in about 55-60 FPS for standard 2.5.2 and ~40 FPS for latest SVN release..
SVN did much more 'stutter', meaning partly running fast through the demo, but then going very delayed and such.

the new card got more RAM, the Shader Model 2 now works, and so on, still the (bad) differences stay.