Display & Other Problems

[deccan]

Hehe, the devs did say that they were learning how to program as they went along making the game. Bloated code is to be expected.

[Arryn]

deccan said:
Hehe, the devs did say that they were learning how to program as they went along making the game. Bloated code is to be expected.

Perhaps they were using Microsoft code as examples when they were learning?

{One should never pass up a chance to take a free cheap shot at M$}

[alexti]

Arryn said:But I would not be surprised if there's some rather inefficient code lurking somewhere that's causing the lackluster performance.

Unlikely, it runs fine on 4 (or maybe 5) years old GF2MX. On another hand, most people avoid ATI on Linux (OpenGL) due to amazingly poor performance. We should count ourselves lucky that Dom2 runs on ATI at all. Some other games can't run in OpenGL on ATI at all.

Also, I remember reading that when there're many relatively simple objects (like 5000-6000 units on the battlefield), ATI is not that good (presumably they mostly optimizie for first person shooters). This would also explain, why Dom2 is so slow on ATI.

[Arryn]

Sigh. Half-Life 2 had better be worth it, as the coupon for a free copy was the only reason I got the ATI card over the nVidia.

[alexti]

Radeon 9800Pro for 280 CAD looks really attractive. If they only fixed drivers...

[Johan K]

Arryn said:
No offense to the IW guys, but I suspect the "problem" (for lack of a better word) is in their engine and not in the Open GL drivers, because the Omega drivers did improve performance for Doom 3.

Doom 3 is a popluar benchmark, so ATI optimizes their drivers especially for it in order to score well. If Dominions was a popular benchmark as well, I bet your driver upgrade would have made wonders for the framerate. Hmmm... we should get a hardware reviewer to play Dominions and make it the next major graphics benchmark

[Arralen]

IIRC, all those ATi Users (me at work included ) get either 8, 15.x or 32 fps .. so it looks to me as if some strange sync thing is going on.
This would be either a SDL or a Dom2 issue .. did you ever contact the SDL developers about this?