Last night I did a FPS comparison on my 1.7Ghz Celeron second computer and was amazed to see 1 FPS - my 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 machine was giving me 545 FPS as a comparison (monitor refresh off). I updated the drivers and managed to get about 10 FPS.
Now my game is currently running at 1280 X 1024 in 32-bit colour - but it's only a 2d chess program! I know A chess program doesn't have to run at that resolution but I'm going for high quality. Using 1024 X 768 gave me 38 FPS against 712 FPS. Obviously it's actually 2d in 3d and I'm taking advantage of the alpha transparency effects, scaling and rotation, but the difference is far more than expected and as I want to try and sell this at some stage is quite worrying.
The graphics card on the Celeron is an Intel graphics card and so is poor - but 1 FPS! OpenGL is undersupported on PC compared to mac and I personally thought the switch was a mistake - although I could understand the switch for cross compatibility.
Is anybody currently writing a DirectX module? Because I think one is necessary for slower graphics cards at least. Even if it's a driver issue - does every potential customer of games we write have to download drivers to get even a useable frame rate?
Hopefully I'll come up with some optimizations and I certainly will offer lower resolutions. But I'm a bit concerned for software developed with BlitzMax at this moment.
Now my game is currently running at 1280 X 1024 in 32-bit colour - but it's only a 2d chess program! I know A chess program doesn't have to run at that resolution but I'm going for high quality. Using 1024 X 768 gave me 38 FPS against 712 FPS. Obviously it's actually 2d in 3d and I'm taking advantage of the alpha transparency effects, scaling and rotation, but the difference is far more than expected and as I want to try and sell this at some stage is quite worrying.
The graphics card on the Celeron is an Intel graphics card and so is poor - but 1 FPS! OpenGL is undersupported on PC compared to mac and I personally thought the switch was a mistake - although I could understand the switch for cross compatibility.
Is anybody currently writing a DirectX module? Because I think one is necessary for slower graphics cards at least. Even if it's a driver issue - does every potential customer of games we write have to download drivers to get even a useable frame rate?
Hopefully I'll come up with some optimizations and I certainly will offer lower resolutions. But I'm a bit concerned for software developed with BlitzMax at this moment.