Bizarre performance issues

[Andrea B Previtera]

I installed the stable 1.2 release only yesterday, and until now I played using 1.0. There was something puzzling me about Exult smoothness, so I reinstalled the old version and did a few tests.

I've got two machines. A monster computer, and a rather normal one.
Strangely enough, version 1.0 performs almost the same on the two PCs, while version 1.2 performs *better*, and a lot better I'd say, on the old machine!! In particular, on the new machine it seems to suffer some "hiccups", unrelated to pathfinding as far as I can tell.

I am using Exult with both the sound packs but no OGG music, 400x300, 2xsai scaler.

Slower machine: Athlon XP 1500+, 512 mb ram, Windows XP sp2, Geforce 4 Mx, onboard sound card

Faster machine: Dual opteron 2400, 4 gb ram, Windows 2000 sp4, 2xSLI Geforce 6900

[drcode]

I'm afraid I have no clue about this. Didn't 1.0 still use the old method of having the companions wander with the Avatar, instead of following in formation? That used a lot more CPU, so I'd expect 1.2 to be faster on both machines.

[Andrea B Previtera]

I didn't look into Exult code or the MinGW compiler that deeply but... could it be some issue with threading and the dual processor?

[drcode]

Maybe. While we don't do multi-threading in the main code, SDL uses it for playing the audio. But I'd expect dual-processors to make that more efficient.

[Gradilla Dragon]

Threads share the memory space with the process that created them. They can't be moved to another processor without moving the whole process.

[Colourless]

The Midi code under windows is Multithreaded. But it's not going to cause very much performance difference.