Exult Forum

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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