[Flightgear-devel] FG frame rate tests

[Pigeon <pi...@pi...>]

Hi,

    I was "lucky" to have possessed a laptop with an ATI display chip,
and so I've been doing some testing with FG on it. As noted by Ampere,
FG older versions (0.9.6) gave a better frame rate than 0.9.10 or CVS,
especially when using the 747 aircraft, which for FG CVS out-of-the-box
settings, I'm getting 1-3 fps.


    What I've done currently is to tune FG without mucking around the
code at all. Only the data is changed or moved away.


    I tried a few different ways to play with the data so far:

    a) Removing Textures.high/
    b) Textures scaled down to 50% of the original (CVS)
    c) Textures scaled down to 25% or the original (CVS)
    d) Materials with multiple texture are changed to have single texture in the materials.xml
    e) Scenery/Objects/ directory is removed
    f) ai disabled, ai-traffic disabled, traffic-manager disabled


    To make the result easier to read, I've made a little table showing
all the tests applied and the resulting frame rate, and can be found
here:

    http://pigeond.net/flightgear/tests/fgfs-test-ati-20061015.html


    In short, I managed to get the fps from 1-3 fps (unusable)
to 47-50 fps, by using most of the above methods at once.


    What I wanted to suggest is maybe:

    - some of these could be turned on or off easily from the rendering
      options?
      (e.g. High quality texture or not, renders Objects or
      not, use single or multiple textures for one material)

    - some of these should be off by default?
      (e.g. I noticed the aircraft_demo and traffic-manager are now
      turned on by default from fresh CVS preferences.xml)


    I hope this is somewhat useful, as constantly there are new people
trying FG out and it's totally unusable and unflyable, which they have
no idea what to do or try.

    Thanks.


Pigeon.