severe game lag

i have zdoomgl v 0.7, doom 1.9, 380 mhz processor, voodoo3 card. My problem is that the game lags pretty bad even in the menu. the graphics look fine but the sound seems to lag with the video.

I guess it's because of your processor. It's only 380 mhz, that could be it.

Are you sure it's actually using hardware accelerated OpenGL?

Probably something to do with the fonts being slow on slow processors. On my old 350, the game would run fine unless there was any text on the screen. No problem with this comp, though ;)

It's not the processor speed or the fonts. Many Older system's graphic cards aren't compatible with opengl at all, resulting in severe game lag. My mom's computer has a 1.0 Gigahertz processor, but it has an older graphics card in it, so anything opengl has severe lag. It COULD be that your processor isn't fast enough or it could be because of the fonts, but I am almost sure it's because of the graphics card.

Nope, a Voodoo3 should be able to run OpenGL just fine.

This is true. I have a Voodoo3 at work which I test on every once in awhile (just to make sure it still works on the older hardware). The fonts brutalize performance still (regenerate the texture for each character output), so that's what it probably is.

i can play newer games like half life (no mods) and unreal with very little or no lag at all. could it just be that zdoomgl and my system is like oil and water? i hope not cuz zdoomgl looks great and im pretty ticked off that i have this problem. by the way, doomgl works perfectly fine on my system.

timmie said:

The fonts brutalize performance still (regenerate the texture for each character output)

Didn't you say you were going to fix that when I reported this same problem a month or two back? You should consider this an actual BUG and fix it before the next release... PLZ KTHX ehehehe...

Well, I optimized it as much as I could =/

I know I'm going to have to redo all the font stuff sometime, I'm just dreading doing it... Now that I understand how things work in there a bit more though, maybe it'll go smoother than the last time I tried to preload all the fonts.

Don't worry timmie, you're not responsible for Voodoo's opengl font implementation.

You've done this much, I'm certain you can get that much more done...

The Merovingian said:

Don't worry timmie, you're not responsible for Voodoo's opengl font implementation.

Heh, it's not really the Voodoo3's fault, per se. It's just that I'm regenerating the font texture for each character which is very slow on the Voodoo3's. If I could generate the whole font all at once, just once, there'd be no problem... It's mostly due to the odd format that ZDoom uses for the fonts. They aren't normal patches so I have to figure out how to convert them to RGBA format.

The Merovingian said:

Don't worry timmie, you're not responsible for Voodoo's opengl font implementation.

Works like crap on my ATI too.

Yeah it has more to do with CPU power than anything else.

So..what is your recommended minimum cpu speed?

try running half-life in opengl mode. i have a 1.7 gig processor with 256mb of ram and sometimes zdoomgl has some lag. even in software mode!

DaS GiFT said:

i can play newer games like half life (no mods) and unreal with very little or no lag at all. could it just be that zdoomgl and my system is like oil and water? i hope not cuz zdoomgl looks great and im pretty ticked off that i have this problem. by the way, doomgl works perfectly fine on my system.

my question still hasn't been addressed directly.

Hmm, so does it lag all the time, or just sometimes?

Make sure you are running in 16 bit mode (gl_vid_bitdepth 16) and have the stencil buffer turned off (gl_vid_stencilbits 0). The stencil buffer should get disabled in 16 bit mode, but better safe than sorry. Textures should also be 16 bit textures (gl_texture_format GL_RGB5_A1). Make sure you are also running in fullscreen mode (fullscreen 1) or have your desktop set to 16 bit color for windowed mode. Oh, also make sure your status bar is the fullscreen status bar (hit '+' until it goes away) since the face status bar is drawn with the same methods as fonts (which will be pretty slow).

Other than that, I'm not sure what it could be =/

well, i have some good news. i d/l the newest version and runs with no lag! Hell Yeah! one thing though, walls tend to be invisible is areas close to the charater. only if i knew how to take screenshots and post 'em they would be here for you to see, timmie

For the walls: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15364