ZDoom

And if people did that a bit more often, perhaps the manufacturers would take notice and improve things from the outset. As is is, we the customers effectively let them get away with making a substandard product.

Well that's the problem: Sure there's many people out there who know better and want more, but far more overwhelmingly the human population as a whole is ripe for exploitation, so that's exactly what corporations do - we get exploited from two opposite corners of the universe and back, day in and day out and half the time we're completely unaware of it.

I'm learning first hand how horrifically easy it is to do precisely that in my CISSP course in college, and how important it is to guard against it. The best way to counteract this, obviously, is with training, and encouraging the use of critical thinking, but in this case, trying to get a mass of people to think critically, as well as educating them on what they might really want in a computer, is to say the least, a bit of a challenge.

Okay, i got something i wanted to report.

The last time i had a GZDoom update was on g3.2.1. I had to wipe my OS last week and decided to update GZDoom. Got both Modern and Vintage 3.5.1 builds so i could test them. With vintage, things start well but then i'm having 100% CPU usage spikes all over the place, that lagged GzD so bad that sometimes the screen (and music) just frozen still for 3 - 5 seconds. There's no such thing happening with Modern build, however, it works great and smooth as butter. That inconsistency bothered me, so i decided to do some more testing: downloaded my trusty old g3.2.1 build from Dropbox again, and for the sake of experience, Zandronum 3.0. And while the old GZDoom build worked smooth as a charm just like the modern 3.5.1 build, Zandronum had the same CPU spikes issue as vintage 3.5.1 (meaning: they are both unplayable here).

I'm using an old, 2012 laptop for 4 years now, and i never had these issues with GZDoom (or Zandronum for that matter,although i rarely play with Zandro). I'm glad modern version is working flawlessly, as i'm gonna use this build for now on, but i'm wondering: why vintage 3.5.1. and Zandronum had the same problems here on my system?

My laptop is powered by an AMD A4-4355M with Radeon HD Graphics, 1.9Ghz, 6GB Ram running on Windows 7 Ultimate x64. I know it's old and weak, but as i said, i never had problems with GZDoom here before.

The modern builds had a major refactoring of some of the rendering (I think it had something to do with flat/subsector rendering, if I remember correctly) which improved speed on complex maps, particularly for those with faster GPU's, by thinning the bottleneck stoppage on the CPU. It sounds like you have a super powerful GPU but a grossly underpowered CPU. The vintage build is more CPU-locked than the modern builds are because of this refactoring, which is one of the reasons for the switch - on older systems, the bottleneck is typically on the GPU, instead, and the CPU is left free.

This sounds like something different, i.e. like something is stalling the system. What's weird is that it affects two very different builds but not one that's closer to the latter of these than the modern one.

That aside, the CPU savings are very minor, the main reason for the split was that GL 2 hardware reacted very poorly to some recent changes.

Sorry for reviving the topic but what is the situation with true color software renderer in GZDoom? In version 3.6.0 it is rather choppy on my Intel i5 3.4 GHz desktop computer with Windows 10 64-bit (tried modern and legacy build of GZDoom). I have tried old 1.3.0 version of QZDoom and the renderer ran smoothly while using Direct3D backend. After switching to OpenGL it went super laggy. On the other hand 8-bit software renderer in GZDoom is buttery smooth, no problem there.

Tried on my laptop with Intel Core i7 2,7 GHz and Windows 8.1 64-bit and had the same problem.

Played in 1920x1080 resolution.

There was a 50% performance regression in software since 3.3 and it wasn't fixed on intel i think. But is it really that slow?
Try the vintage build at a lower resolution or LZDoom (still has D3D).

Blzut3 wrote:On Linux with the open source Intel or AMD drivers should see double the frame rate from before. On Windows with AMD/ATi graphics should see similarly, although still regressed compared to D3D*. AMD performance is currently mostly the same between Windows and Linux with Linux slightly in the lead**. Intel on Windows and my 2009 Mac Mini with nvidia are still regressed, but likely nothing can be done about them.

I don't know the technitalities but is the true color sodtware renderer dependant on graphics card? If so my desktop comuter has Geforce 750ti and as far as I know there shouldn't be problems with Nvidia hardware.

Only slightly. If you have a shit OpenGL driver then you'll never get a real framerate in Software mode. If everything's good on the GPU side though, then the framerate you get for software is strictly CPU dependent.

Alright I have tested version 3.2.5 and got nice and smooth framerate using either D3D9 or OpenGL (the latter seemed even more performant with no micro stuttering). Then tested 3.6.0 again and the framerate dropped to around 30 fps. So yeah it looks like 50% performance drop.

What do you get with vid_vsync off?

I don't use vsync. I have tried to turn it on and off again and performance is roughly the same.

Fullscreen or windowed?

There's something fishy going on. I don't play windowed so I tried to switch both modes. It was smooth in windowed mode but the resolution was smaller so I switched it back and to my surprise the fullscreen was smooth too. So tried to enable vsync and it went to 30 fps. I restarted the game, switched to windowed mode and before doing anything set resolution to 1920x1080. Got 60 fps with vsync on. Then I switched to fullscreen (still with vsync on) and again got 60 fps. I have to try it again when I have more time.

The joys of modern computers. Apparently something in your system messes around with the video driver.