DevilutionX performance degradation
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2022 1:08 am
Leading up to the 1.4.0 release of DevilutionX, we found that the game recently took a major hit to performance. When doing tests on my old 3DS console where before town could run at 30 fps and the dungeon could run about 20 fps, the most recent builds from our CI seem to run at 17 fps in town and around 7-9 fps in the dungeon. To cut a long story short, the performance degradation occurs on my dev builds when I upgrade the following three packages to their latest version.
dkp-libs 3ds-cmake 1.3.0-1 [installed: 1.1.1-1]
dkp-libs devkitarm-cmake 1.1.1-1 [installed: 1.0.0-4]
dkp-libs dkp-cmake-common-utils 1.3.1-2 [installed: 1.1.0-1]
The versions I currently have installed (listed above) are the ones I used to produce the 1.4.0 release version, so you can feel free to run your own comparisons between our CI builds and the latest release version.
I don't know enough about the changes made to these three packages to be able to speculate on what might be the cause, which is why I'm reaching out here in the hopes that someone else does. What I do know is that the game uses a CPU renderer to draw assets onto SDL surfaces, making CPU the primary bottleneck when it comes to the game's framerate. Also, whatever it was that caused the performance to degrade seems to have affected everything across the board, from the FMVs to the loading screens and of course the gameplay itself.
Does anyone involved with devkitPro have an idea of what might have impacted performance in this way?
Thanks in advance.
dkp-libs 3ds-cmake 1.3.0-1 [installed: 1.1.1-1]
dkp-libs devkitarm-cmake 1.1.1-1 [installed: 1.0.0-4]
dkp-libs dkp-cmake-common-utils 1.3.1-2 [installed: 1.1.0-1]
The versions I currently have installed (listed above) are the ones I used to produce the 1.4.0 release version, so you can feel free to run your own comparisons between our CI builds and the latest release version.
I don't know enough about the changes made to these three packages to be able to speculate on what might be the cause, which is why I'm reaching out here in the hopes that someone else does. What I do know is that the game uses a CPU renderer to draw assets onto SDL surfaces, making CPU the primary bottleneck when it comes to the game's framerate. Also, whatever it was that caused the performance to degrade seems to have affected everything across the board, from the FMVs to the loading screens and of course the gameplay itself.
Does anyone involved with devkitPro have an idea of what might have impacted performance in this way?
Thanks in advance.