OpenGL & Intel drivers

[slotdev]

Hi

I have a hardware platform, of around 8000 PC systems, running XP Embedded with Intel Extreme 2 Graphics. Yes I know it's rubbish. They have version 6.14.10.4497 drivers installed.

OpenGL version is:
GL renderer: Intel 855GM
GL version: 1.3.0 build 4.14.10.4497
GL SL version: not applicable

So it only supports OpenGL 1.3 - not great but we used Geeks 3D GPU caps viewer and it runs a "donut" 3d animation (20,000 polygons + lighting) at 50fps with 1024x768 window. It looks fine.

Us doing simple 2D blitting should be very easy, then. But no, we get 99% CPU usage and ~1 FPS. Our game has around 64mb graphics but we removed pretty much everything and still the very bad frame rate.

I know Intel drivers are crap....but this is really bad. Does anyone know what we can do?

Thanks
Ed

[slotdev]

BTW, I know there are issues with Intel drivers and FBO stuff, but we don't use any of that (or at least, we can disable it, which we have already for this).

[Laurent]

I'm sure you already know that you won't get any relevant answer with such a question

You need to profile your code, find the bottleneck, and then come back once you have a very clear idea of what's slowing your game down.

[slotdev]

I'm sure you already know that you won't get any relevant answer with such a question

You need to profile your code, find the bottleneck, and then come back once you have a very clear idea of what's slowing your game down.

Yeah, we've done all that for the other systems the code runs on. No problems. I can run the exe on any other system and it's fine. Similar hardware with OpenGL 2.1 support = no problems. Running that "donut" demo on other hardware gives double the FPS, so I know the hardware/driver is at fault.

The drivers on the hardware are in fact the latest ones, too. I know the problem isn't in our code, but I will enable debugging anyway and get some numbers.

[Laurent]

What do you draw? Lots of sprites? Text? Vertex arrays?

Do you use SFML 2?

[slotdev]

What do you draw? Lots of sprites? Text? Vertex arrays?

Do you use SFML 2?

SFML 2 yes, and we're only drawing ~30 sprites per frame. OK some are big (1024x768) but others are much smaller. No text, we use our own bitmap font stuff (included in the 30 sprites). It is literally basic 2D blitting. Nothing crazy.

We're now going through our code, but we use various other systems, some even worse than this - and no problems.

[Laurent]

How many textures do these 30 sprites use, and what's their size? Is it static or dynamic geometry?

[slotdev]

How many textures do these 30 sprites use, and what's their size? Is it static or dynamic geometry?

We load 2x 2048x2048 textures (max size the hardware can support) and we create the sprites from them. Geometry is static.

Thanks

[Laurent]

It seems like it's either a fillrate or texture problem.

You can do a simple test:
- reduce the size of the textures (but not the size of the sprites) -> if FPS is higher then the problem is the texture size
- reduce the size of the sprites (but not the size of the textures) -> if FPS is higher then it's a fillrate problem
- if none of these tests produce a higher framerate then it's another problem

[slotdev]

It seems like it's either a fillrate or texture problem.

You can do a simple test:
- reduce the size of the textures (but not the size of the sprites) -> if FPS is higher then the problem is the texture size
- reduce the size of the sprites (but not the size of the textures) -> if FPS is higher then it's a fillrate problem
- if none of these tests produce a higher framerate then it's another problem

It seems to be a texture problem! Even though the system says it can load 2048x2048 textures, actually it can't - anything over 1024 wide causes the problem. So we're having to change our tiles to be smaller.

Thanks for the help anyway, Laurent, I really appreciate it

Ed