Just Curious But........

[Jester]

Lately i have been noticing little jolts of slow down while playing pretty much anything, thrash rally @ 200mhz without sound and i even got it in tilematch once.

It's the same kind of thing that happens when your using a relatively slow PC and playing a game thats using every drop of performance and then the cpu has to do another process in the background, and the game goes jolty for a second or two, dodgy explanation i know but only comparison i can think of really.

I've only noticed this the past couple of days and can't think what could be causing it, wether it's normal and i've only just noticed i'm not sure, so i was just curious if anybody else has experienced this.

:blink:

 

[virusx]

Yes I have noticied this too. It sounds very strange to me as it happen anytime.
I don't know if it's truely the processor that is kind of overflowed or if it's a media problem (slow sd card).
I think there's some topics about this on this forum.

 

[nickspoon]

Flavor reckons it's to do with SDL_Delays letting other processes do stuff.

 

[virusx]

Is there a 'noob' way to change something about this SDL_Delays thing ?

 

[Jester]

Ahhh i see, so this is a known problem then, well ok then cool as long as it's not just me lol, it's not really a big deal i was just curious to be honest.

 

[taras]

Is there a 'noob' way to change something about this SDL_Delays thing ?

​

I would guess it's compiled into the software so the only way to do it would be to rewrite the code...

 

[Dzz]

I spent a lot of effort pulling my hair out over this issue while working on Vektar. I think I was able to get the game fairly smooth but there are still occasional interruptions.

The major "unfixable" cases appear to be caused by the fact that linux (at least the linux on the gp2x) is not a "real time" operating system so while you are playing a game it can decide that it needs to do somthing else for a little while. I'm not sure exactly what these things are, but it is difficult to stop the system from doing them. There was speculation that the particularly nasty interruptions had to do with the system mucking around with the SD card.

As a programmer, it is possible to increase your priority to become a "real time" process and that does seem to help a great deal. Unfortunately, that seems to interfere with the kernel implementation of the audio device so sound gets messed up.

 

[virusx]

that's not noobie enough for me :lol:

 

[racoon]

Thanks for clearing that up, Dzz, is there someone who is working on mods to the kernel so it prevents such slowdowns?