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Okay now this is VERY weird.

In my current project I recently had an unexplained drop in my fps times. Since in most cases the program doesn't have to do a lot of time consuming stuff I am usually in the range of 3000+ fps. (True, not only by screen fps() but also confirmed by FRAPS). This is mostly due to the fact that less then 5 images need to be drawn per frame if I am doing nothing and I test my codes at SYNC RATE 0 to see if anything suddenly kills my frame rates.

Recently it dropped from those 3000+ to 500-600 fps.

Since most screens don't require a lot of speed I didn't realize the drop in my framerate at first, especially since I wasn't doing anything speed relevant so I can't recall just what I did that could have affected them so badly.

So I started timing my program routines to find out what is eating up my time. I use:

and a similar construct around smaller parts of the program with t2(t). When I save the values at the end I can see how much time my program has spent in total in the main loop and how much on the routine I stopped with t2t.

After some attempts to find the evil doer I had this result:
"113277 ms wasted on T1, 108660 on T2"
108 seconds of 113 total running time consumed by a small set of code lines, there's got to be some sort of bug in these lines.

Now the first weird thing is that this particular part of the program hasn't been changed "in ages".

I actually narrowed it down to ONE command. ONE of a whole lot of commands called each frame. ONE command in 7000 lines of code, that uses 95% of the time in my main loop. ONE command I had at that place for months now. This is no joke, when I turn that command into a remark my fps jumps from 500-600 back to 3000+.

This is what's eating the time, including the timing commands:


So I'll just stick to my inital thought aka topic subject: WTH?

Any thoughts?

After all of that build-up, it's an easy one

Somewhere else in your code, you have added another SET TEXT TO XXXX command (bold, italic, bolditalic, transparent, opaque), or changed the font, or changed the font size.

If you stick with an unchanging font, then DBPro does just fine. If you want to switch or change your font in some way, then use cloggy's plug-in.

Within the forum community, it has been known for a long time that changing text parameters put the brakes on a loop. Changing them within a loop is usually done only for diagnostic purposes, seldom for a running loop. You might draw some constructive suggestions for workarounds if you describe the specific reasons you wish to change text parameters from "normal" to whatever within the loop. For example, many folks have adopted bitmap fonts for certain purposes.

Seriously?

I'd have imagined that a "set text to normal" does nothing more then changing a value used by text commands to format their output. I would NEVER EVER have believed that such a command could cause such an enormous slowdown. (I know 500-600 fps should suffice, but who knows how much of these 500-600 remain on lower-end systems. Adding to this, a single command causing a slowdown of 80 % is just too much...)

The reason I needed it there was that my program has lots of text output (dialogs, game data, descriptions, tool tips). Most of these are rarely drawn or just when the program needs to change something other then the mousepointer or highlighting a button. But since I sometimes forget to reset values after I did something with them I put two commands in to restore my text output to my programs default so I don't suddenly get half a screen of bold or italic writing, which I need to format my texts

I would recommend looking into either bitmap fonts or a plugin suchas Cloggy's d3d_func plugin. The native dbpro text commands are slow, and since the text doesn't have AA it can look very ugly and rough.

Right, those fonts do tend to be rough and ugly ^^

Do these cloggy's funktion work similar to the regular text commands?
Where can I find it and how is it licensed?

It's free, and you can find it here:http://www.dbdepot.co.uk/d3dfunc.html

The text commands are a lot for flexible, but still not hard to use and work basically the same as regular text commands. There are examples in the download.

I'll take a look. Maybe they won't slow my program down by 80 % ^^

Many thanks!