Discussion: Optimising code for speed in GLBasic

[MrTAToad]

Thats a good idea!

[Wampus]

Thanks Ian! Yes, the scaling is probably the most significant thing.

Just now I did a whole series of tests and found that scaling is particularly expensive on these old Intel onboard graphics chipsets. Rotating is less expensive but still more expensive than simply drawing an non-rotated sprite twice. Oh and it makes no real difference if smooth shading is off or on; scaling is still slow. Whole screen scaling in particular will hugely drop fps from my tests. Despite having a slow Celeron processor my GF's computer is much quicker for scaling (and other 2D tasks) because "Intel Extreme Graphics 2" has better hardware scaling support than my computers.

Mystery solved!

bigsofty I knew these old Intel GFX chipsets weren't very good but just how bad they really are has surprised me. Most current and older netbooks will have them as well as some older PCs. This is something I'll have to consider carefully since I want anything I write to work smoothly using my netbook as the bottom line.

Again, if anyone wants to know how their apps perform on really crap PCs, that's obviously my speciality.