Automapping causes drop in framerate?

[JkWhoSaysNi]

With automapping enabled my framerate drops significantly.... when there are many people on the screen.

If there are only a few people on the screen there is now slow down or if there are many and I have automapping disabled there is no slow down. However, If I have automapping turned on and there are many people on the screen then I experience a vast slow down (enough to make the framerate warning message to pop up).

I cant see how my framerate can drop given the system requirements and the specs of my computer:

AMD XP 2800+ Barton.
1gb PC3200 DDR.
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.


I also cant see the connection between automapping and the number of people on the screen.

On a side note, even with automapping disabled if there is a lot of text on the screen i will experience a small slow down. Why would text cause a drop in framerate?

Any ideas how I can fix this problem?

Thanks.

p.s. I have only ever experienced this in the windows (on XP pro) client. Never the linux one, although I havent used the linux one as much.

[maximus_asinus]

What is your connection? With high speed make sure you disable UDP. Also for some reason on Classic it will prompt to disable DirectX.

[Admins]

Automapping can eventually make walking slower, but if you are not watching the map or walk around then the automapping should not have any impact on the frame rate. When automapping is enabled it holds some more textures in texture memory, which shouldn't be a problem except the gfx driver is really bad (and doesn't swap out the textures if they are not in use).
Text is one of the slowest things on v2, because it is using the true type font rendering engine of Windows which is looking nice but is slow. You can eventually limit the length of nicknames in the options to speed that up. On a 2.8 GHz computer that shouldn't be necessary though, normally.

[JkWhoSaysNi]

My connection is 750k cable... so moderatly fast.
I will try disabling UDP and see if there is any difference.

Also, i'm usiny Catalyst 4.10. I will try 5.2 but 5.* have caused me problems in Knights of the Old Republic 2.


Would using a smaller font size improve speed when there is a lot of text?

[maximus_asinus]

I see you on Classic right now, I'll explain some options to you there.

[calani]

No, a smaller font size would have no impact on the time it takes to render it.
Look into vector graphics. Size is just a multiplier for coordinates.

[Kaimetsu]

Originally Posted by calani

No, a smaller font size would have no impact on the time it takes to render it

Well, that's not entirely true. The fewer pixels you have to alter, the less time it'll take.

But obviously that's not the bottleneck here.