[Mark]

In Mapster I was in area X which is isolated from the rest of the map and accessible by a teleporter. I noticed that when I pressed ' and X to enable Polymer lighting my framerate dropped from 240 down to 32. In area X to try and isolate the slowdown I first removed all Polymer spot and point lights. No real change. Next I removed the ton of models. No change. I removed the simple TROR section. No change. I removed all sector tags and effectors. No change. I deleted all but a single sector of area X and still no real change in framerate. As a last resort I dragged area X even further away from the rest of the map to area Y in case it was a matter of being physically close to other Polymer lighting in the rest of the map. I remember that being an issue that Plagman fixed but gave it a try anyway. Still no difference.

So what this boils down to is that I thought being isolated away from the rest of the map that these separate areas would keep a high framerate. But it seems the rest of the map, even though not rendered, is still a huge drag on FPS. That sucks because myself and others have created large maps with low framerates and one solution always suggested is to break up and isolate parts of the map from each other. Well that doesn't seem it would help much now.

EDIT: This massive slowdown does not happen in Polymost and I'm using almost the newest eduke version 5805

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[Danukem]

Mark., on 15 August 2016 - 04:50 PM, said:

So what this boils down to is that I thought being isolated away from the rest of the map that these separate areas would keep a high framerate. But it seems the rest of the map, even though not rendered, is still a huge drag on FPS. That sucks because myself and others have created large maps with low framerates and one solution always suggested is to break up and isolate parts of the map from each other. Well that doesn't seem it would help much now.

EDIT: This massive slowdown does not happen in Polymost and I'm using almost the newest eduke version 5805

Yeah it sucks but it's nothing new. And no, it has never been an issue in Polymost. What's both hopeful and frustrating is that this shows that huge gains could be made in Polymer performance, if only someone knew how to stop it from rendering those unseen areas, or whatever it is doing with them.

[TerminX]

Send it to me and I'll run it through a profiler and see exactly what's going on. The sorts of debugging utilities available for free on Windows have really improved over the past several years, both in quality and quantity. Tracking down a performance drop this massive should be relatively simple.

[Danukem]

TerminX, on 15 August 2016 - 10:49 PM, said:

Tracking down a performance drop this massive should be relatively simple.

It's not a drop, though. That is just how Polymer rolls, and always has AFAIK. The question is, why doesn't the framerate go up to very high numbers when the player is in an easy to render situation? I noticed the same thing recently when trying to test DNE. Even if I got into an isolated sector and stared at a wall, the framerate would stay low; the mere presence of a complex map that I wasn't looking at was enough to kill it.

[Tea Monster]

TerminX, on 15 August 2016 - 10:49 PM, said:

Send it to me and I'll run it through a profiler and see exactly what's going on. The sorts of debugging utilities available for free on Windows have really improved over the past several years, both in quality and quantity. Tracking down a performance drop this massive should be relatively simple.

Thank you!

[Mark]

Since the slowdown in an isolated area doesn't happen until the lighting is enabled I'm assuming its the unseen lighting in the rest of the map ( there is a lot of it ) that is dragging things down. Its a relatively small map so I don't think its the geometry slowing things down. So I'm going to ask Mblackwell if he can bundle up his "light hack" code from our Decay project and I'll try it out in this latest project. It turns off lights not in the immediate vicinity of the player. It may need to be tweaked for distance but its well worth a try.

Until then I'm going to remove some of the larger lighting in other parts of the map and see if FPS increases or not in the isolated areas.

[Mark]

I removed at least 25 spot and point lights in other parts of the map ( there are more still in the map ) and the big slowdown in the isolated area is not quite as bad. Instead of dropping from 240 down to 32 it is dropping to 75. So in my mind it confirms that unseen lighting is at least part of the drag.