Hi folks. I have a question. I run my little WIP game on my old AMD integrated
graphics machine, and it runs at 10-16 frames per second because it has heavy
models and lots of scripts running, etc.
I was curious what a good machine would run it at-- so I sent a standalone to a
friend who has a NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2060 SUPER to see what speeds it would
operate at for him. Come to find out that the frames are only 14-20, which is
not much better than my slow AMD-- does anyone know why the discreet
card would not be used and how to get GG to utilize the card-- I think the speed
for him should easily be over 80-100 fps?! Thanks.

i have he RTX2070 Super send me you game and i will benchmark it for you.

also you did not mention specs of your friends PC? is it a PC or laptop it maybe using the Intel card if laptop.

you set the Discreet vs onboard in Nvidia control panel

Getting a game to work well on different platforms, cards, ram, etc., is an art.
For this reason, a game, in addition to many other things, must be as compact as possible, textures (lower resolution, better performance), polygons (lowpoly better than hightpoly).
In this section, the scripts play an important role, since they eat the fps with potatoes.
This forces the author of the game to be very careful when writing the scripts. Declare the variables wisely in the right place and time, limit the scope of the variables to what is strictly necessary, do not constantly invoke a function to get a value that you do not need at this point in the game, or that you will no longer use, avoid as much as possible that one script constantly calls another, etc. try to debug the code to the maximum, and destroy all entities that you no longer need.
A poorly crafted script can slow a game down.

About how to get GG to work with a specific card through a standalone, without it including a menu for this, tbh I don't know. I know that in test mode you can know the card that GG uses by pressing f11, I know that the Nvidia card allows you to configure it to be used with GG, I ignore other cards.

Hi Graphix-- I will see if I can find out the specs. This guy is 2000 miles way
from my location-- so there's no sit down and watch over the shoulder!
Have to email responses when they after work

Hey 3com-- "I know that the Nvidia card allows you to configure it to be used with GG,"
That sounds like an interesting thing you said, any more info? I might ask
him if he has looked into the control menu......

BTW, I'm certain the scripts are a primary driver of slowness-- that's LUA for you
I guess. These scripts are resource driven, so stopping most of them isn't a very
likely option unfortunately. But maybe- maybe some efficiency could be restored?
Or- is my game doomed to the bin?!

https://www.howtogeek.com/351522/how-to-choose-which-gpu-a-game-uses-on-windows-10/


I wouldn't say that maybe it's not ready yet, maybe it needs more work.


Or maybe you have to test them one by one and measure the impact they have over the performance.

Well, you can see if you press TAB what the AI usage is.

If it's high, then your scripts are possibly an issue. If it's low, then it's probably a rendering thing. It really depends, as 3com mentioned, on things like; how many scripts are running? Are your objects crazy high polygon? Are they using larger textures than needed? Is there something in the FPE causing an issue? Are your scripts running properly?

Also if any physics objects are fighting somewhere, you know jostling for position as they can when they get too close. That can cause serious slowdown, similar to walking close to a high poly collision object can drop fps to the floor.

Normally if I get slowdown to the level of 14 fps it's because there's some issue with collision or physics. Rarely down to simple rendering (unless you have a lot of objects and they do not get optimised for some reason by the draw call optimiser). It's rare for scripts to actually be a big slowdown issue. But they can contribute for certain. Especially if they are not as efficient as they could be or your just using a LOT

You can also use F11 and then disable each aspect to see what is eating the fps That allows you to test pretty much everything, including the entities themselves. Pretty easy to suss performance woes when you use those. At least for your own machine

Thanks for the info guys. Yes, F11 shows some handy data-- and it looks like
(for me at least) it's mostly AI (scripts) for the slowdown-- there are no stock
characters in the game, just a couple animated items. Also texture size,
yes, I should work on that, I look at a certain building and can just feel the whole
engine bog down!! lol No need for that in my game, it's just a cheesy gather
resources game.

Well you now know that the AI scripts probably need optimising or you need to run less of them at once, which is kinda the same thing If you find your game slows down from a single building, you need to lower it's polys and (possibly) it's texture.It must be a pretty detailed building

yes, when scripting or any programming language, always good to only read/run the whole script if specific criteria are met and if not use "return" to prevent whole of script to be processed.

I want to ask the community more about graphics cards. As an example
on ebay there's a slew of cheap computers that come with the GTX 1030
is it any good? Or should I stay away? There are a few with the 1060- at
higher price of course, and the 1650-- which is the better choice?

Also, should I even consider an AMD gr card machine?

horses for courses but if going the Nvidia route a bear minimum would be a GTX1060 this card supports VR 1050 do not support VR, as far as AMD are concerened i dont use them so cannot help

I'm running a GTX 1060, in an AMD 6 core, 2.8 gHz. It powers through my most dense maps.

I remember (years ago) a GG staff member talking about performance in dense maps, not being based on the number of entities, but the depth of polys and size of textures. There is also a LOD function which can reduce the poly counts of more distant entities, but that's a modeling thing and I have never used it myself.

There is one thing for sure; If GG Max were to upgrade to a 64 bit software, our performance problems would be over. I upgraded my POSER software to a 64 bit version. Photo-realistic 1080 renders in less than a minute, vs four to five minuter on 32 bit.

"It powers through my most dense maps. ..."

Wait a minute- is that as a standalone? (which actually should probably
be better).
But mostly-- Is that with 60-70 custom >>scripted<< entities?

"not being based on the number of entities, but the depth of polys
and size of textures."

That's what I'm looking at now-- if I get back to my game. Just a little
bit burned out on it at the moment. I usually prove something can be done
in scripting then lose interest in turning it into a complete mapped game-
and just move on to other tests...

I hate GG map building - no copy and paste- + poor widget. Oh yeah I should
have mentioned that in my other post across the hall!

"If GG Max were to upgrade to a 64 bit software,"

Exactly. A good reason finished products on Classic are pretty rare, and that
I'm quite afraid to go very far with it in filling up levels. Like I just said I really
really want to finish a game but the memory cap keeps me to just testing and
that's about it.

BTW, the visual menus give a sort of terrain and entity distance factor.

I imagine that's probably more to do with better multi-core cpu and gpu support than 64bit

Regarding Graphics , yeah if you can stick with an 060 at least, you will have a far faster card than the lower versions. Even a 960 is probably a fair bit faster than a 1030. The 10x series cards were a bigger jump than usual though, so normal rules don't always apply with them, so there's a bigger gap between 9 and 10 card's than older cards.