Just discovered this project, inquiries about performance

International board General discussion
#1

Hi, I am very glad to discover this project after googling around with the intention of starting something similar :smiley:

I compiled and have been messing around with the engine and it’s impressive, but the performance is bothering me a lot…

It’s very very jerky on my computer (top end gaming PC), I can notice lots of stuttering, starting in the main menu when you hover the icons. The map screen jerks a lot when moving heroes around (my mouse cursor even gets stuck in place while a hero is moving around). It’s playable, but it’s very bothersome.

Is this a know problem or am I doing something wrong? None of this happens in vanilla HoMM, even in very old computers. I have tried all the different renderers available without any change whatsoever. I am yet to try running it in a different OS than Windows, though.

#2

I’ve been using VCMI on Windows since forever and had no stuttering.

Another possibility is antivirus, they don’t seem to like VCMI at all.

#3

Glad to know it’s just me then. I’ll be doing further tests at home.
How is it comparable to vanilla HoMM? Does the engine run well on older PCs with integrated GPUs ?
Thanks!

#4

As far as I know, the engine does not use any GPU at all and just CPU rendering. But for sure performance shouldn’t be any issue with modern gear.

#5

Just tested it on my Linux Mint install, and it runs perfectly smooth, without a single fps drop! Awesome.
But what could be causing that lag in Windows? It’s a clean install of Windows 10 (is it supported at all?). I’m at loss here… I already tried messing with all the configurations available

You can see in the screenshot I posted, that just by hovering the main menu icons it eats up a whole core from my quadcore CPU

Specs:
AMD Phenom 965 x4
Nvidia GTX 960
12GB RAM

WindowsCPUUse.png1299×648 792 KB

#6

I use Win10 (both 32 and 64 bit) and vcmi works fine. A community here doesn’t report any issues you mention either. It’s maybe something with drivers.

#7

There is performance dropdown in some cases for me (try to enter town screen, then “shake mouse” to switch between different creature slots at the bottom part of town screen). This causes FPS drop, that is noticeable when looking at animated buildings.

Anyway, VCMI rendering should be replaced at some point, as it uses old SDL 1.2.

#8

VCMI uses SDL 2.0 for a long time now. As far as I know, SDL 1 support has already been dropped.

#9

Technically it uses SDL 2, but I guess it uses elements from “SDL1”, which are included there too, SDL 2 has hardware acceleration when all elements are SDL_Texture, the parts of VCMI code I saw use “legacy” SDL_Surface