Can't use Sapphire due to terrible Lag?

[ShadowIce]

Hi Aaron. I for some reason on a REALLY good graphics card, an NVidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti, cannot get the FPS to go above 0 for some reason in Sapphire, even though this card can handle the Heaven Benchmark demo on ultra settings @ 30 FPS +...

Please, PLEASE fix this and release as a small patch.

Thank You so much for all of your help!

Have a good day!

Sincerely,

ShadowIce~

[Aaron]

Hi ShadowIce,

I'm very sorry for not having solved this problem for you yet. I'm working on a script now that will test all the components of Sapphire to see which OpenGL features are causing your system to slow down. It should be ready for testing in a day or so.

Best regards,
Aaron.

PS: Has anyone else found a problem with rendering speed in Sapphire?

[Aaron]

Hi ShadowIce,

Can I ask you to download the 'sapphire_debug_v2.zs' script file from here:

http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/doku.php?id=scripts:sapphire_debug_v2

Save the ZS file some place you can find it, then:

1. open L3DT and load your map project,
2. in the L3DT menu, select the 'Extensions->ZeoScript->Run script file' option
3. in the open dialog box, select the ZS file from wherever you saved it
4. click 'OK' in all the popup messages that appear
5. once it's all done, use the 'copy text' button in the event log (which should now be open), and paste the text into a reply here so I can check the results.

Please let me know if you find any problems with running this script.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[ShadowIce]

Code: Select all

CMapGroup::WBL_LoadList error:
 - cannot open TXT file

CMapGroup::AutoLoadMap warning:
 - cannot load water body list

Sapphire debug v2

 - HF is 1024 x 1024

 - HF horiz scale is 10m

 - HF vert range is -593.545 ... 661.57m

 - TX is 2048 x 2048

Starting test 1: all disabled

Frame 0 rendered in 1076ms

Frame 1 rendered in 1404ms

Frame 2 rendered in 1716ms

Frame 3 rendered in 1232ms

Frame 4 rendered in 1108ms

Frame 5 rendered in 1856ms

Frame 6 rendered in 1139ms

Frame 7 rendered in 1061ms

Frame 8 rendered in 1997ms

Frame 9 rendered in 1294ms

Starting test 2: ElevLUT

Frame 0 rendered in 1014ms

Frame 1 rendered in 1700ms

Frame 2 rendered in 1186ms

Frame 3 rendered in 1154ms

Frame 4 rendered in 1716ms

Frame 5 rendered in 1498ms

Frame 6 rendered in 920ms

Frame 7 rendered in 1622ms

Frame 8 rendered in 1514ms

Frame 9 rendered in 1201ms

Starting test 3: lighting

Frame 0 rendered in 1155ms

Frame 1 rendered in 1529ms

Frame 2 rendered in 1887ms

Frame 3 rendered in 1451ms

Frame 4 rendered in 920ms

Frame 5 rendered in 1388ms

Frame 6 rendered in 16ms

Frame 7 rendered in 47ms

Frame 8 rendered in 47ms

Frame 9 rendered in 1138ms

Starting test 4: fog

Frame 0 rendered in 437ms

Frame 1 rendered in 47ms

Frame 2 rendered in 31ms

Frame 3 rendered in 47ms

Frame 4 rendered in 1560ms

Frame 5 rendered in 1154ms

Frame 6 rendered in 1014ms

Frame 7 rendered in 3947ms

Frame 8 rendered in 1326ms

Frame 9 rendered in 1419ms

Starting test 5: skybox

Frame 0 rendered in 1451ms

Frame 1 rendered in 499ms

Frame 2 rendered in 16ms

Frame 3 rendered in 31ms

Frame 4 rendered in 1482ms

Frame 5 rendered in 1591ms

Frame 6 rendered in 1357ms

Frame 7 rendered in 1373ms

Frame 8 rendered in 1732ms

Frame 9 rendered in 1997ms

Starting test 6: terrain texture

Frame 0 rendered in 2075ms

Frame 1 rendered in 1373ms

Frame 2 rendered in 2028ms

Frame 3 rendered in 1809ms

Frame 4 rendered in 1233ms

Frame 5 rendered in 1763ms

Frame 6 rendered in 1653ms

Frame 7 rendered in 1654ms

Frame 8 rendered in 2012ms

Frame 9 rendered in 2013ms

Starting test 7: detail map

Frame 0 rendered in 1779ms

Frame 1 rendered in 1684ms

Frame 2 rendered in 1966ms

Frame 3 rendered in 1685ms

Frame 4 rendered in 2449ms

Frame 5 rendered in 998ms

Frame 6 rendered in 63ms

Frame 7 rendered in 62ms

Frame 8 rendered in 1513ms

Frame 9 rendered in 2340ms

Starting test 8: water texture

Frame 0 rendered in 2901ms

Frame 1 rendered in 3042ms

Frame 2 rendered in 3277ms

Frame 3 rendered in 3962ms

Frame 4 rendered in 3526ms

Frame 5 rendered in 2823ms

Frame 6 rendered in 3869ms

Frame 7 rendered in 3838ms

Frame 8 rendered in 3307ms

Frame 9 rendered in 3167ms

Starting test 9: cursor mesh

Frame 0 rendered in 2824ms

Frame 1 rendered in 3323ms

Frame 2 rendered in 187ms

Frame 3 rendered in 78ms

Frame 4 rendered in 171ms

Frame 5 rendered in 2668ms

Frame 6 rendered in 4368ms

Frame 7 rendered in 6146ms

Frame 8 rendered in 3776ms

Frame 9 rendered in 141ms

Starting test 10: all modules

Frame 0 rendered in 2792ms

Frame 1 rendered in 3791ms

Frame 2 rendered in 4072ms

Frame 3 rendered in 4025ms

Frame 4 rendered in 3713ms

Frame 5 rendered in 3604ms

Frame 6 rendered in 3744ms

Frame 7 rendered in 3292ms

Frame 8 rendered in 3884ms

Frame 9 rendered in 4056ms

Frame 10 rendered in 4040ms

Frame 11 rendered in 4056ms

Frame 12 rendered in 4056ms

Frame 13 rendered in 2949ms

Frame 14 rendered in 93ms

Frame 15 rendered in 94ms

Frame 16 rendered in 47ms

Frame 17 rendered in 47ms

Frame 18 rendered in 31ms

Frame 19 rendered in 31ms

[Aaron]

Hi ShadowIce,

Thanks for the log. Wow, it shows the rendering is incredibly slow even when just about everything is turned off (no water, texture maps, detail map, lighting, fog, mesh objects, etc.) I don't think I've ever seen this before, so I don't have the debugging tools in Sapphire to diagnose this sort of problem just yet. I wonder if this is something to do with slow triangle rendering, or if it's a more global OpenGL problem? Can you please try this again, but using a tiny heightmap (say, 256x256 pixels)?

It could also be due to the reverse raycasting for the cursor projection, as other users have had driver problems with this in the past. I'll have to build another version for you with the cursor turned off to see if this is the problem. This will take a little while. In the mean time, can you move the cursor out of the Sapphire window? Does it improve the rendering speed?

Is anyone else, anyone at all, having problems with Sapphire's rendering speed? Please respond, yea or nay.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[ShadowIce]

Code: Select all

Sapphire debug v2

 - HF is 256 x 256

 - HF horiz scale is 10m

 - HF vert range is -288.924 ... 232.581m

 - TX is 256 x 256

Starting test 1: all disabled

Frame 0 rendered in 452ms

Frame 1 rendered in 250ms

Frame 2 rendered in 250ms

Frame 3 rendered in 15ms

Frame 4 rendered in 359ms

Frame 5 rendered in 109ms

Frame 6 rendered in 78ms

Frame 7 rendered in 390ms

Frame 8 rendered in 374ms

Frame 9 rendered in 187ms

Starting test 2: ElevLUT

Frame 0 rendered in 47ms

Frame 1 rendered in 0ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 16ms

Frame 4 rendered in 47ms

Frame 5 rendered in 93ms

Frame 6 rendered in 16ms

Frame 7 rendered in 16ms

Frame 8 rendered in 15ms

Frame 9 rendered in 16ms

Starting test 3: lighting

Frame 0 rendered in 16ms

Frame 1 rendered in 0ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 16ms

Frame 4 rendered in 16ms

Frame 5 rendered in 78ms

Frame 6 rendered in 16ms

Frame 7 rendered in 15ms

Frame 8 rendered in 16ms

Frame 9 rendered in 16ms

Starting test 4: fog

Frame 0 rendered in 219ms

Frame 1 rendered in 188ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 328ms

Frame 4 rendered in 390ms

Frame 5 rendered in 312ms

Frame 6 rendered in 249ms

Frame 7 rendered in 188ms

Frame 8 rendered in 63ms

Frame 9 rendered in 312ms

Starting test 5: skybox

Frame 0 rendered in 453ms

Frame 1 rendered in 405ms

Frame 2 rendered in 297ms

Frame 3 rendered in 15ms

Frame 4 rendered in 515ms

Frame 5 rendered in 453ms

Frame 6 rendered in 62ms

Frame 7 rendered in 437ms

Frame 8 rendered in 530ms

Frame 9 rendered in 31ms

Starting test 6: terrain texture

Frame 0 rendered in 390ms

Frame 1 rendered in 468ms

Frame 2 rendered in 312ms

Frame 3 rendered in 31ms

Frame 4 rendered in 437ms

Frame 5 rendered in 359ms

Frame 6 rendered in 530ms

Frame 7 rendered in 484ms

Frame 8 rendered in 187ms

Frame 9 rendered in 281ms

Starting test 7: detail map

Frame 0 rendered in 281ms

Frame 1 rendered in 499ms

Frame 2 rendered in 297ms

Frame 3 rendered in 514ms

Frame 4 rendered in 562ms

Frame 5 rendered in 125ms

Frame 6 rendered in 15ms

Frame 7 rendered in 546ms

Frame 8 rendered in 593ms

Frame 9 rendered in 562ms

Starting test 8: water texture

Frame 0 rendered in 780ms

Frame 1 rendered in 109ms

Frame 2 rendered in 624ms

Frame 3 rendered in 905ms

Frame 4 rendered in 514ms

Frame 5 rendered in 874ms

Frame 6 rendered in 811ms

Frame 7 rendered in 343ms

Frame 8 rendered in 812ms

Frame 9 rendered in 873ms

Starting test 9: cursor mesh

Frame 0 rendered in 593ms

Frame 1 rendered in 749ms

Frame 2 rendered in 296ms

Frame 3 rendered in 765ms

Frame 4 rendered in 405ms

Frame 5 rendered in 749ms

Frame 6 rendered in 375ms

Frame 7 rendered in 639ms

Frame 8 rendered in 234ms

Frame 9 rendered in 842ms

Starting test 10: all modules

Frame 0 rendered in 842ms

Frame 1 rendered in 250ms

Frame 2 rendered in 202ms

Frame 3 rendered in 624ms

Frame 4 rendered in 608ms

Frame 5 rendered in 578ms

Frame 6 rendered in 374ms

Frame 7 rendered in 733ms

Frame 8 rendered in 531ms

Frame 9 rendered in 16ms

Frame 10 rendered in 15ms

Frame 11 rendered in 0ms

Frame 12 rendered in 15ms

Frame 13 rendered in 16ms

Frame 14 rendered in 15ms

Frame 15 rendered in 16ms

Frame 16 rendered in 31ms

Frame 17 rendered in 31ms

Frame 18 rendered in 344ms

Frame 19 rendered in 811ms

[ShadowIce]

Hi, Aaron! Any luck? :/

[Aaron]

Hi ShadowIce,

Thanks for the log and sorry again for my slow reply.

The last log was interesting, in a scary kind of way. It showed that the frame rate was very patchy; some frames were rendering quickly (60fps) as they should, but a few frames before or after the rendering was really slow (2fps), even though the contents of each frame are exactly the same. What this means is that even when your graphics card is given precisely the same set of instructions, the time it takes to perform those instructions varies wildly. In comparison, on my system I get pretty much the same rendering time for every frame in each test (30-60fps), which is the expected behaviour.

The tests we've run so far have ruled out a whole bunch of possibilities, but have not yet pinpointed what's running so slowly. I think I'll have to further modify Sapphire to allow us to log the time taken for each of the subroutines called in Sapphire. This is going to take a little while, as it's a bit of work.

In the mean time, do you have access to another computer on which to test L3DT? (doesn't really matter how old, so long as it's running XP or later) I'd really be interested to see if you can reproduce this on a different system.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[ShadowIce]

Here's my log on my Windows 8 laptop:

Code: Select all

Sapphire debug v2

 - HF is 1024 x 1024

 - HF horiz scale is 10m

 - HF vert range is -325.398 ... 997.124m

 - TX is 2048 x 2048

Starting test 1: all disabled

Frame 0 rendered in 124ms

Frame 1 rendered in 0ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 16ms

Frame 4 rendered in 32ms

Frame 5 rendered in 16ms

Frame 6 rendered in 15ms

Frame 7 rendered in 16ms

Frame 8 rendered in 31ms

Frame 9 rendered in 32ms

Starting test 2: ElevLUT

Frame 0 rendered in 156ms

Frame 1 rendered in 0ms

Frame 2 rendered in 16ms

Frame 3 rendered in 15ms

Frame 4 rendered in 47ms

Frame 5 rendered in 15ms

Frame 6 rendered in 16ms

Frame 7 rendered in 16ms

Frame 8 rendered in 32ms

Frame 9 rendered in 31ms

Starting test 3: lighting

Frame 0 rendered in 266ms

Frame 1 rendered in 16ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 0ms

Frame 4 rendered in 46ms

Frame 5 rendered in 0ms

Frame 6 rendered in 15ms

Frame 7 rendered in 31ms

Frame 8 rendered in 31ms

Frame 9 rendered in 15ms

Starting test 4: fog

Frame 0 rendered in 156ms

Frame 1 rendered in 16ms

Frame 2 rendered in 16ms

Frame 3 rendered in 0ms

Frame 4 rendered in 31ms

Frame 5 rendered in 15ms

Frame 6 rendered in 16ms

Frame 7 rendered in 16ms

Frame 8 rendered in 16ms

Frame 9 rendered in 31ms

Starting test 5: skybox

Frame 0 rendered in 187ms

Frame 1 rendered in 0ms

Frame 2 rendered in 16ms

Frame 3 rendered in 0ms

Frame 4 rendered in 47ms

Frame 5 rendered in 0ms

Frame 6 rendered in 16ms

Frame 7 rendered in 16ms

Frame 8 rendered in 31ms

Frame 9 rendered in 31ms

Starting test 6: terrain texture

Frame 0 rendered in 297ms

Frame 1 rendered in 141ms

Frame 2 rendered in 0ms

Frame 3 rendered in 16ms

Frame 4 rendered in 31ms

Frame 5 rendered in 16ms

Frame 6 rendered in 16ms

Frame 7 rendered in 16ms

Frame 8 rendered in 15ms

Frame 9 rendered in 31ms

Starting test 7: detail map

Frame 0 rendered in 234ms

Frame 1 rendered in 140ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 15ms

Frame 4 rendered in 31ms

Frame 5 rendered in 15ms

Frame 6 rendered in 15ms

Frame 7 rendered in 31ms

Frame 8 rendered in 31ms

Frame 9 rendered in 47ms

Starting test 8: water texture

Frame 0 rendered in 250ms

Frame 1 rendered in 172ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 15ms

Frame 4 rendered in 47ms

Frame 5 rendered in 32ms

Frame 6 rendered in 31ms

Frame 7 rendered in 32ms

Frame 8 rendered in 47ms

Frame 9 rendered in 46ms

Starting test 9: cursor mesh

Frame 0 rendered in 266ms

Frame 1 rendered in 156ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 16ms

Frame 4 rendered in 47ms

Frame 5 rendered in 31ms

Frame 6 rendered in 15ms

Frame 7 rendered in 31ms

Frame 8 rendered in 47ms

Frame 9 rendered in 47ms

Starting test 10: all modules

Frame 0 rendered in 266ms

Frame 1 rendered in 156ms

Frame 2 rendered in 15ms

Frame 3 rendered in 16ms

Frame 4 rendered in 47ms

Frame 5 rendered in 15ms

Frame 6 rendered in 31ms

Frame 7 rendered in 31ms

Frame 8 rendered in 47ms

Frame 9 rendered in 47ms

Frame 10 rendered in 46ms

Frame 11 rendered in 62ms

Frame 12 rendered in 78ms

Frame 13 rendered in 63ms

Frame 14 rendered in 78ms

Frame 15 rendered in 62ms

Frame 16 rendered in 63ms

Frame 17 rendered in 78ms

Frame 18 rendered in 78ms

Frame 19 rendered in 63ms

It has a built in graphics card. It worked just fine here, although a little slow due to crappy built-in card.

I was afraid of that. It's an NVidia specific card glitch.

PLEASE tell me u can fix it

[ShadowIce]

Hello?

[Aaron]

Hi ShadowIce,

I'm sorry, I can't fix driver problems, only NVIDIA can do that for you. In all likelihood, NVIDIA will fix this in their next driver update, but you might do well to search the NIVIDIA site for OpenGL rendering problems & solutions with your card/driver, and report an issue if you have not done so already.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[ShadowIce]

I don't think it's a driver issue, though...... I have the most up to date drivers for my card as well.

[ShadowIce]

Hello? :/

[ShadowIce]

My graphics card is top of the line, and yet it ONLY runs for shit on your L3DT.... There's something wrong with L3DT. NOT my drivers.

[Aaron]

Hi ShadowIce,

I would hazard a guess that you only find L3DT running badly is because the other programs you use are either running a different version of OpenGL, or DirectX, and won't be affected by your card having poorly optimised OpenGL 1/2 drivers. Sapphire mostly uses features from older OpenGL standards (1.4 and 2.1, mostly). New games that use OpenGL will be using 4.0 or later, and this is what card vendors test for when developing drivers for their new cards. Relatively few people buy top of the line cards to use older software, so the first release of drivers for new cards often have limited backwards compatibility or limited optimisations for old versions of OpenGL. Some time later, after enough people have reported faults to the card vendors, they develop more complete drivers to fix these sorts of obscure problems. You can see some examples of this occurring in these two forums threads, where the up to date drivers for new cards were causing Sapphire to misbehave or crash, which were then fixed some time later by the vendor issuing better drivers. I myself had some stuttering performance in Sapphire when I last updated my graphics card (a long time ago, mind you), but fortunately for me NVIDIA were pretty quick at fixing their drivers in my case.

Now, you can view this in two ways. Either NVIDIA is at fault because their current drivers for your card are not doing a very good job with OpenGL 1.4-2.1 function calls. Or, it's my fault, because my program is using OpenGL 1.4-2.1 function calls. Maybe it's both mine and NVIDIAs fault.

But what to do about it? Well, NVIDIA will probably release updated drivers for your card that will fix this problem, at some point. I have no real idea how long that will take, but I'd guess a couple of months at the outside. It's probably no real priority for them, as the number of customers of theirs who are reporting problems with OpenGL 2-era software would be a tiny fraction of a percent. I too will probably re-write Sapphire at some point to use the more modern flavours of OpenGL, or build an entirely new rendering plugin. This I can assure you that won't happen very soon, as it's a huge job, I don't have much development time, and the number of users of L3DT that are reporting problems with NVIDIA drivers is also a fraction of a percent (i.e. you, out of several thousand). I'm not going to prioritise the rewriting of the 3D renderer because, by the time I'd have finished the changes and debugged it, after much effort, for one user, with no new features or benefits for anyone else, NVIDIA will probably have fixed the driver problem for you, so my effort would be wasted.

Now, having said I won't fix this problem, I will of course provide you with a full refund if you feel that running L3DT on your laptop is unacceptable. Please let me know, and I'll set the refund machinery in motion.

Best regards,
Aaron.