2010-01-09 snapshot

[yzmxer608]

Phenom II 965 BE (C3 stepping, so its the 125W rated version).

724MB jlv.

[yzmxer608]

Is there any way to have MXS use all available cores (or code it in)? When I set the process affinity to just one of the cores the game's sound gets screwy.

[jlv]

There is some stuff that could be parallelized. It's very hard to get double the performance out of 2 cores though. Looking at some old profile data, I'd estimate a 25% gain if I parallelized everything that could possibly be parallelized.

[yzmxer608]

I have 4 cores, so would it still only use 2? 25% isn't too bad, better than nothing.

[jlv]

It would use more than 2, but the functions that can be parallelized only account for about 25% of the time. So if you had an infinite amount of processors, it would be 25% faster. If you only had 2 processors, it would be about 12.5% faster, 4 would be about 19% faster, etc.

OTOH, the parallelizable functions might account for more time if there are more bikes in the game. I forget how many were in for that profile run.

[yzmxer608]

Do you think it's something that is worth doing?

[jlv]

It's definitely worth doing. There are other things that need doing that are more important though.

[yzmxer608]

Good to hear .

[yzmxer608]

Sorry to bring this back up, but I was wondering if this is kind of like what happens to the disp in game? Frustum Culling

[jlv]

No. While it does do frustum culling, that would only eliminate around 3/4 of the geometry on average and none of it in the worst case. It needs to eliminate 9/10 of the geometry in the worst case. To do that you need to use a continuous LOD system. There are a bunch of papers about it here.

[yzmxer608]

Oh, lot more complicated than what I thought hehe.

On a side note, I'm now getting average of 80-100fps on Mantova with the same settings...(same with all other 2049x2049 tracks too). I'm not sure what happened, but I'm getting GREAT performance now, I did mess around with ATI Tray Tools some but I'm pretty sure all of the settings are the same as before.

[yzmxer608]

Figured out having Framebuffer objects enabled is what causes the low performance. I forgot I turned that off, I enabled it just to see and I saw at least a 30 fps decrease.

[jlv]

When you disable FBO's it will cap your ground texture res to 256. Does it run well with the ground res at 256 with FBO's on?

[yzmxer608]

No, it's the same performance as before.

[yzmxer608]

Figured I'd post here since it somewhat relates to what was said before. MXS has been crashing a lot, I've only finished one race at A3 today (online and off). I've tried with and without FBO, it just randomly crashes (mx.exe has encountered...). The lastlog says nothing about the crash, it just shows the last thing that was displayed (in SP it's the amount of texture memory used). I'm just not sure what's going on, it's getting really annoying.