Extreme slowdown/memory pressure on Mac

If you found a bug in Illarion or need help ask here. / Wenn Du einen Fehler in Illarion gefunden hast oder Hilfe benötigst, frage hier.

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Dwagon
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Extreme slowdown/memory pressure on Mac

Post by Dwagon »

I use a MacBook Pro, running version 10.10.5 and with a NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB graphics card.

Whenever I boot up the game, even when just on the tutorial without moving or inputting any commands, memory pressure increases to in excess of 800MB. (I've included a screenshot.) It's so slow that the Illarion music begins to clip and stagger, even when I'm not running any other programs in the background. From what I gather, the game isn't supposed to be more demanding on the CPU than Left 4 Dead and Portal 2. :wink: I've reinstalled once, but is there anything else I can do to fix this issue?
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Seajiha
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Re: Extreme slowdown/memory pressure on Mac

Post by Seajiha »

First: Try to change between fullscreen and windowed mode. If you are very lucky this will solve your problem.

Second: The reason why there are bugs in the mac version is: (afaik)
- the developers do not use osx and therefore testing it is very hard
- the "graphic backend" is handled quite different by osx (read: bad) which is why the game needs much more memory than it should. portal and l4d use other backend that are specifically tailored for mac and therefore do not have this bug. Maybe Nitram is able to fix this.
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: Extreme slowdown/memory pressure on Mac

Post by Estralis Seborian »

There are similar reports also for other OS, see e. g. http://illarion.org/mantis/view.php?id=11077

I can also confirm that the client grabs more than a gigabyte of ram what is just crazy for a game like Illarion. Nitram once told me that the client loads all kinds of graphics into the memory. We don't use textures on 3D models, so everything you see are small png files.
Dwagon
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Re: Extreme slowdown/memory pressure on Mac

Post by Dwagon »

Thanks for the suggestion Seajiha. I tried it in both windowed and fullscreen mode--same effects in each, sadly.

At least I'm not the only one I guess, Estralis. I was surprised that such simple graphics were somehow taking up so much space! Are there any available solutions in sight? I'm a big fan of what I've seen of this community and this project, I'd hate to not be able to participate just because of weird memory allocation.
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S'rrt
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Re: Extreme slowdown/memory pressure on Mac

Post by S'rrt »

Estralis Seborian wrote:There are similar reports also for other OS
Yes, I say likewise that most of the time Java for me takes several hundred MB RAM on Windows 8.1 64bit and oddly enough the RAM use of my explorer.exe seems to go up when Illarion has been started.
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Nitram
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Re: Extreme slowdown/memory pressure on Mac

Post by Nitram »

Hello,

Illarion uses a lot of memory. There is no point in talking around this. Only to load the graphics there is something in the region of 500MB required. The graphics in the memory must be uncompressed image files. The PNG compression does not apply and is only there for the storage.

That being said there is always the additional overhead caused by Java and the wrappers to get the graphics to the graphics device though the operating specific pipelines. Sadly the pipeline for OpenGL that we are using does not work very well on OSX. There is a updated version of the pipeline that is supposed to work a lot better, but it is a lot of work to update to that new version because they changed a lot of things.

You have to understand that Illarion is a very old game when it comes to the technology it uses. Sprite based games a very outdated and do not perform well anymore on current hardware and drivers because the optimizations moved on and toward 3d and shaders. Both are things that are not at or and barely used in Illarion.

We are aware that Illarion will progressively start to perform worse as drivers and technology is moving on. And it is not unlikely that Illarion is or will be more demanding for the graphics device then newer titles, simply because the graphics devices have to emulate a lot of things they are not optimized for anymore.

Best regards,
Nitram
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