Intel HD Graphics Crashes

[bjg]

fps are written over the phrase "Planetary Report", so you need to close that to see clearly (but that increases the fps). Mine is 21 on the Intel 4000 64 bit binary. 32 bit gives 23, but goes down to 17 than I move the map around.

[sven]

fps are written over the phrase "Planetary Report", so you need to close that to see clearly (but that increases the fps).

Hrm, yes. That is a problem at some resolutions. I'll add a little black background in the next patch.

Mine is 21 on the Intel 4000 64 bit binary. 32 bit gives 23, but goes down to 17 than I move the map around.

Ok, good, that's similar to the results I'm getting on my Intel HD 3000. That 32-bit should be a bit faster than 64-bit makes sense (as the 32-bit binary is smaller, and so can take better advantage of your processor's cache heirarachy). The slight slowdown when first moving around the map is also expected -- I'm now doing some extra caching of star orbit lines and fleet icons that will cause a little slowdown when any new icon appears on the screen, but it should become mostly unnoticeable after you've played for a while.

Also -- it's worth noting that as of last week, the "more spinning planets" option will likely slow down your framerates slightly. (Because we thought it looked cool, all new installs have this option turned ON by default.) I haven't measured much more than 5-6 fps worth of performance gain after turning it off, but, in certain situations, the difference might be more noticeable.

[bjg]

fps on the tactical screen (around 20 ships, full zoom out) is 9-10.
BTW, can we get more zoom? Yes, I did turn "extra tactical zoom" on, but my ships still don't fit on the screen.

[sven]

fps on the tactical screen (around 20 ships, full zoom out) is 9-10.
BTW, can we get more zoom? Yes, I did turn "extra tactical zoom" on, but my ships still don't fit on the screen.

That's slower than I'd like. Would you upload this battle?

[bjg]

I'll upload the next one. They all quite big.
Update: 869 and 870. Select all the ships and have the lower panel open.

[sven]

I'll upload the next one. They all quite big.

Ok, yeah, that's moderately huge. And a good test case of the basic tactical rendering. What I'm seeing is that the framerate is around 50 fps when no ships are selected, but, as low as 10-11 if you multi-select most of the fleet. (That suggests a bottleneck in the attack preview or weapon console logic.)

I'm also seeing that for a fleet this large, multi-selection of big groups leads to tremendous UI latency, which is something else that could really use fixing.

[bjg]

On the second one I've got fps 7.

[sven]

sis64 runs and loads the game for me (on Win7), haven't tried to play yet.

Oh no! Did you just get a crash this morning while testing with sis64.exe? If so, can you tell me what you remember about what you were doing when it happened? (Had you just loaded a game, did the crash happen between turns, etc...)

[bjg]

Was just loading a game (using "continue"), and got a "out of graphic memory" (now I'm not 100% sure "graphic" or "system"). Oddly enough the task manager showed only about a 1 gig out of 8 available (and even less free). Couldn't figure out where is the memory (didn't try too hard, just looked into all users processes) and just rebooted (very "Windows" behavior).

[sven]

Was just loading a game (using "continue"), and got a "out of graphic memory" (now I'm not 100% sure "graphic" or "system"). Oddly enough the task manager showed only about a 1 gig out of 8 available (and even less free). Couldn't figure out where is the memory (didn't try too hard, just looked into all users processes) and just rebooted (very "Windows" behavior).

Well, from the logs I've been looking over, it looks like out of memory crashes are certainly rarer with sis64 -- but, I suppose they're not gone entirely. Given how big the maps you play are, and the fact that I still have yet to add a "low texture quality" switch to the game, I suppose it's possible that this was a legitimate "out of texture memory" error -- i.e., between SiS and whatever else your computer had been doing, the driver decided that it didn't want to allocate a huge burst of new memory when you started up the game. And that's not necessarily a bug, per say. Just a sign that I need to ramp back the memory use on certain hardware.

[bjg]

Lets just say that a "regular" user want be happy with it, specially because the way it happens - with that "out of memory" dialog on the background invisible and only way to get somewhere (I've found) - Ctrl-Alt-Del, Run Task Manager.

[sven]

Lets just say that a "regular" user want be happy with it, specially because the way it happens - with that "out of memory" dialog on the background invisible and only way to get somewhere (I've found) - Ctrl-Alt-Del, Run Task Manager.

Yeah, even if crashes do remain possible on certain machines, and at certain settings, I'll need to improve the way they're handled.

[bjg]

Today it had crashed (out of video memory) from the game (click "Colonize" to be exact). Fresh boot, all memory available.

[sven]

Today it had crashed (out of video memory) from the game (click "Colonize" to be exact). Fresh boot, all memory available.

Could you upload the map where the crash happened? Looks like I should probably do a few more memory diagnostics.

[bjg]

game_891
It's an early game, nothing massive is going on yet. My "recepy" against crashes was to don't play long, exiting to have a tea or even to check the forum. Yesterday I've played about 6 hours without exiting.