[SDL] S-L-O-W

[Michael Rickert]

--- Stefan Viljoen <rylan at intekom.co.za> wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have Redhat 7.3 system, with 512megs of RAM and
> Geforce 4 MX 440 video 
> accelerator.
> 
> I have donwloaded Mesa and a SDL-OpenGL program
> (linuxssn) - the mesa OpenGL 
> demos seem to run at a reasonable rate, but the
> SDL-OpenGL program runs at 
> about two seconds per frame.

Mesa is a software only version of OpenGL. If you want
hardware acceleration, you'll need to install DGA
drivers (and probably upgrade XWindows if on RH 7.3 to
support DGA). Fortunately, nvidia has such drivers.
You'll want to uninstall Mesa before installing their
drivers.

> Any idea how I can speed the program up? I am a
> relative Linux newbie - I 
> heard you can "renice" a process to give it more
> time on the processor? How 
> can I find what is "robbing" CPU time from my SDL
> program?

Well, there probably isn't anything robbing your CPU
time, just your CPU having trouble rendering OpenGL
scenes using only software (read: icky slow,
especially with alpha transparency or anything like
that).

If you want, you can try "ps" and "ps -A" which should
give you a list of processes and how much CPU time
they've used (you'll probably want to do "ps -A |
more" as the list is large using -A for all)

renice dosn't exactly ring a bell... 'nice' is a
program (and a measure) which allows processes to be
'nice' and be less important. Renice I assume undoes,
or is the opposite of that.

This may cause system instability in some
circumstances, it's akin to changing the priority of a
task using the task manager. Just an FYI.

      -Mike

> Thanks!
> -- 
> Stefan Viljoen
> Polar Design Solutions 
> Software Support Technician
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> SDL at libsdl.org
> http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl


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