Beta 12: Benchmark results and framerate problems!

[netninja]

Great news! I deleted the string from my game and it now seems to run without any slowdown at all! I'll need to use a counter to display the frame rate while I'm testing it instead, but it is a dramatic and obvious difference.

I'm really happy now, because I was considering giving up on this game as I couldn't reduce the objects any more, but this makes everything work well! Thank you very much Andos!

Andos - do you know if counters have any slowdown associated with them? I'm using one currently to display score - it's a graphical one. (I haven't noticed slow down from it.)

[BHGames]

Andos, I know. Strings are immutable -at least in c#- so every new string (either by set or creation) does create a new immutable instance (it does not modify the previous one).

Maybe you can find a solution similar to the StringBuilder class in C#. I mean, by modifying the "inner" string itself.

[Anders]

Netninja:
Counters are only slow if you use the 'text' display option. If you use the bitmap counters there should be no slowdown at all

BHGames:
It isn't because of the string data itself. It is because of the string image that gets drawn. First I have to draw it into a buffer, then delete the existing buffer on the graphics card and then finally upload the new image to the graphics card. This is the expensive operation which slows down the rendering.

[BHGames]

Why don't you render the text directly?

[Anders]

Text rendering isn't exactly fast, especially when you have to redraw almost everything every frame and you do it on a mobile device.
In MMF2 standard runtime it only updates text when necessary too. For the iPhone runtime where it is hardware accelerated we have to avoid doing expensive things every frame. To keep the compatibility with MMF2 runtime and the iPhone runtime, the text rendering has to be somewhat special.

I'm investigating ways to speed up the transfer of the text image to the graphics card.

[Anders]

I have successfully optimized the string objects 'set text' action. It should be many times faster now. Only getting performance differences at around 140 objects now.

I would still advise you to update the string objects only when you need to. Frames per second counters don't need updating every event loop for example

[RhysD]

would an object similar to the mobile fonts one that uses bitmap fonts be faster?

[Anders]

Yes it would, but many letters will maybe give a slight CPU/GPU overhead though as each letter needs to be drawn seperately every single frame. It shouldn't be much of a problem though I think. One can only test I guess.