Topic awaiting preservation: Feedback Lab - New Demo - Need benckmarks.

The Feedback Lab is a little demo I've built over the past couple of days to test out some ideas to be used as a bigger project, but it makes for some nice eye candy all by itself. =)

However, as well as showing it off, I'd like to gauge how fast it runs on a wider variety of computers than I have access to. If you have a few minutes spare and want to check it out (it's only 80k) then I'd appreciate any feedback.

There's a FPS (Frames Per Second) counter in the bottom right hand corner, it averages out the frames drawn to the screen every second and if you leave it in demo mode (move the mouse off the black area) then it should settle to a point. If you could post that number in here, than I'd be most grateful.

If you could also provide the basic specs of your computer then that'd be a big help too, like so:

FPS: 78
OS: Win XP (SP1)
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+
RAM: 512 MB SD RAM

And any other comments you want to throw in would also be appreciated.

Oh, you'll also probably need the latest shockwave player, which is a about a 3meg download if you don't already have it.

Linkage: Feedback Lab v0.3. - 80k ? Needs Shockwave Player

Oodles of thanks!

FPS: ~37
Win XP sp1
AMD Athalon 2100+ 1.73GHz
224 MB

Man, that kind of sucks. Too bad woman won't let me tweak this machine.

FPS: 43-49 (varies when I tweak the sliders)
OS: Windows 2000 SP4
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz
RAM: 512MB PC133

Note: I'm using a cheap, generic graphics card. That could make a difference



[This message has been edited by ozphactor (edited 08-22-2003).]

FPS: 26 at default settings
OS: win 2k pro
CPU: P3 @ 800mhz
RAM: 512+ MB SD RAM

Damn, those scores a low given the speed of your CPU's...

Ozphactor, the Video Card shouldn't really make any difference. 2D image processing is all CPU & RAM based. Maybe I'm getting higher scores because I have a different shockwave engine due to having Director installed on this machine. Although, I'm not running any apps in the background which are likely to tie up CPU or RAM resources.

Anyways, scores over 30 should be fine considering the backgorund fade is time based not frame based, but anything below 30 FPS is still likely to stutter a little. Thanks for the replys though. =)

FPS: 36-38 (default settings - but it seems not to alter too much)
OS: Win XP (SP1)
CPU: Pentium III 733 MHz
RAM: 512 MB PC133

Edit: retested.

I don't think 2d capabilities are not dependent on the graphics card. I have read some reviews on graphics card that mentioned their 2d capabilities. Mine is an ATI AIW 8500DV, far from the latest, rather old, but still good.

[This message has been edited by viol (edited 08-22-2003).]

Voli, all the video card does when drawing 2D graphics is tell the monitor what colours the pixels need to be, nothing more. Seeing as most low end graphics cards can daw an image to the screen @ 1024 by 786 at over 100 times a second (100hz), it doesn't really make any difference on the computers ability to buffer the image data to the main system RAM, process it then send each frame to the graphics display. So the most likely factor for low frame rates in this regard would be background applications hogging CPU power.

That being said, your scores are quite impressive given your CPU speed.

So, the video card doesn't really come inot play here, unless I was using some specific hardware based routines that run through the video card, but I'm not. AT least, I don't think I am. I doubt shockwave uses any specific video card hardware to process it's imaging lingo functions. Eh, I suppose it can't hurt to post the video card specifications as well, but I'll be surprised if it makes any difference.

I'm using a Radeon 9000 Pro, 64MB DDR RAM (which is identical to the 8500's except in comparison the 9000's have a poor multi-texturing performance)

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 08-22-2003).]

FPS: 80 at default settings
OS: Win 2000 (SP4)
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1700+ @1.47 Ghz
RAM: 512 MB PC2100 DDR RAM

Video Card: ATI AIW Radeon (yes, the old one...)

I can get 83 FPS without changing the default settings when I shut down my IIS, SQL Server, mySQL Server, antivirus, etc...

[edit]I can get 89 FPS by optimizing my memory timings, bank interleaving, command timings, etc in my BIOS (I am using an Abit KR7A-RAID motherboard).[/edit]

[This message has been edited by jdauie (edited 08-22-2003).]

Hmmm... ok, maybe shockwave does use some kind of video hardware for it's imaging lingo functions.

I went round to my Dad's place and only got a crappy 13 FPS on his PIII 800 (Win XP), 256MB RAM. Although he only has a TNT2 M64 video card.

I shut down some services (an email server, apache & coldfusion), I closed Flight Simulator 2004 that was idle (apparently no CPU usage), I put my pen, from the Wacom tablet, away (it slows down the fps, I just found out, when touching or near the sensible area of the wacom), now I have "only" 26 processes running and I can get a steady 42 fps.
I don't know how to tweak more my system. I don't feel comfortable changing RAM BIOS settings. So this is as good as it gets.

FPS: 82
OS: Win XP Home Edition
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+
RAM: 512 MB RAM

Jestah

The page just came up blank for me... grey background, empty..

FPS: 123-129 (it wouldn't stay on just one number...but stayed inbetween those. it did go as high as 243)
OS: Win XP Home
CPU: P4 1.9Ghz
RAM: 256 MB SD RAM

__________________________
Cell 1007::

Xpirex, depending on the browser you use you should at least get a message prompting you to downalod the latest shockwave player if you don't aleardy have it.

Also, if you have a browser that can disable flash, that might also be causing your problem as shockwave/flash are very similar.

FPS: 229
OS: Win2000 Professional (SP4)
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz
RAM: 512 MB Rambus 800 Mhz
Video Card Geforce 4 TI 4400 128 MB
Monitor Resolution:1600x1200 with an 85 MHZ Refresh Rate

Stays much the same what ever i do with thw sliders.

I have Shockwave Studio installed (latest version of player)



[This message has been edited by tomeaglescz (edited 08-22-2003).]

FPS: 16-20
OS: Win 98SE
CPU: PII 233 Mhz
RAM: 160 MB
Radeon 7000

FPS: 65
OS: Win 2000 Pro
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1600+
RAM: 256 Mb DDR 333Mhz

With everything closed.

fps = 85
OS Win XPHome SP1
CPU = P4 1.9
RAM = 512mb
Vid = GeForce2 MX400

FPS: 205 (almost constant, jumps to about 206 and 208 at times)
OS: WinXP (SP1)
CPU: AMD Athlon XP Barton 2800+
RAM: 512 MB DDR

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

FPS: 84
OS: Win XP PRO
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1.4
RAM: 512 MB DDR 333Mhz
VID: Gforce 5600FX

Based on all these results, I would say that these are the following points that are important for a good fps in this experience:
- the speed of the cpu;
- the speed of the RAM memory;
- and, probably in a very minor importance, the graphics board;
- maybe also the version of the Shockwave player being used (I used the latest one).
Finally, a good motherboard plays an important role for the overall system performance. My father-in-law has a motherboard that is of so bad quality that his AMD k6-550MHz acts like a PII-200 MHz. He'll upgrade motherboard and cpu to an Athlon 2400+, whatever this means (but he'll keep the old memory sticks).

Two machines to report, at default settings:

Main PC
FPS: 101
OS: WinXP Pro (SP1)
CPU: Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53 GHz)
RAM: 1GB PC2100 Registered ECC
Vid: ATi Radeon VE Dual Display

Test Server (with Apache, MySQL and Imail running)
FPS: 34
OS: WinNT4 (SP6a)
CPU: P-III 600 MHz
RAM: 512MB PC-100
Vid: (on motherboard) Matrox MGA-G200

Side note: Of course covering even a portion of the black area with another window boosts FPS. With it completely covered, 244 on my main PC, 52 on the test server.

Forgot this: Browser seems to make a difference. 101 PFS above is in IE6.whatever. This drops to 94 in Mozilla 1.4. For the record, IE 5.01 on the test server. In all cases Shockwave 8.5.1.



[This message has been edited by brucew (edited 08-22-2003).]

FPS: 27
OS: Win 98SE
CPU: Intel celeron 400 mhz
RAM: 64 MB
Where can i find my videocard info?

EDIT: reducing the decay to 0 (or to the left in any case), it increases to 31
__________________________________


Alevice's Media Library

quote:

---

Where can i find my videocard info?

---

You can try looking in the Device Manager under Display Adapters, I think. I'm not sure exactly where this is in Win98, but it's in the CP somewhere.

Wow, I didn't expect quite this many results.

I've also tested this on my brothers P4 2.4 ghz, it gets around 258~260.

Thanks so much for posting your feedback and fps scores!

I'll actually be using this for an installtion work for now but it will find it's way into internet apps at some point . Even still, I need these test results to specify the target machine for this to run on.

As it turns out, P4 2ghz+ systems seem to really shine with this thing, most likely due to the memory throughput. Thanks again for all your feedback, it's helped a lot!

Drac' are you sure the video card has such limited effect on the resulting fps? In most of the results where a "higher end" vid card is used (and reported) there is a noticeably higher fps. Mind you I think the overall specs may be higher as well.

Places you'll never go (hopefully):

FPS: 10
CPU: Pentium MMX 200MHz
RAM: 128MB
Note: Whole shitload of background apps running at the same time.

Heh, that was fun

for Alevice:
if you haven't found it already, go
Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Information
in the left windowpane, under Components, click on Display

OK...here's what I got...I think I've come in third so far:

FPS: A steady 180, with everything turned up as far as it'll go.
OS: WinXP SP1
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.26 Ghz
GPU: nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4400 128MB
RAM: 768 MB

FPS: hardly 1
OS: DOS 1.0
CPU: Intel 8088 - 4.77 MHz
RAM: 64Kb

Hehe, it's good to see you're having fun trying to get this to run faster, but it's not a really usefull as a benchmark of any kind. Although, I could build some small apps in both director (shockwave), flash and possibly even DHTML for online benchmarking if people were interested in the idea.

However, I do have something I need to get off my chest...

The thought that Video cards affect 2D performance in terms of frames-per-second is something I've enountered a lot but... but... that just isn?t possible!... If you can bare me ranting for a bit, let me explain why...

<rant>
Drawing a 2D image to a screen strains a video card (any card) about as much as moving the mouse strains the CPU. In 2D terms, all a video card does is format a signal to send to the monitor, and we've had cards that can do that at near light speed for many many many years. When a video card features "Hardware Acceleration", that's something else, and also has bugger all to do with the speed that an actual 2D image is draw to the screen (even if the image is of a real-time rendered 3D scene). Hardware Acceleration is all about geometry and texture processing, which is done on the video card then, formatted into a signal that's sent to the monitor as a series of 2D images.

Now, the part of a video card that actually affects 2D performance is the RAMDAC. The quality and operating frequency of a cards RAMDAC is it's only real measurable 2D part of a video card and this is reflected by 2 things; the resolutions (also dependant on the amount of onboard VRAM, but this doesn't effect 2D performance) and refresh rates that the card supports. And secondly, the picture quality of the resultant 2D signals. The funny things about this part of a card though, it that a cheap TNT 2 M64 can have a higher quality RAMDAC than a Radeon 9800 Pro, simply because this part of the card is left up to the manufacturer. This means that often cheaper parts will be used to save prices wherever possible (which is why a lot of people rave on about Matrox cards stunning 2D quality, they never skimp on these parts).
</rant>

Ok... I feel better now. I might not be 100% spot on with all of the technical jargon, but I'm fairly sure it's accurate enough to get the point accross.

FPS: 194
OS: Win XP Pro (SP1)
CPU: Pentium 4 2.4Ghz
RAM: 256 PC800 RDRAM


-Butcher-

[This message has been edited by butcher (edited 08-23-2003).]

how strange.. I just reinstalled the latest Flash player and Shockwave thing and still I just a blank page with grey background... Using IE 6 with default browser settings. Wierd...

Xpirex, either you're using a browser that's blocking flash/shockwave content (many pop-up blockers do this) or, if you're certain that you have the latest shockwave player (not the flash player, the flash player is a completely separate plug-in), then maybe IE is caching the page. Also be sure that that you haven't messed with the mime types that IE uses, additionally, you have to grant Active-X access to IE when you install the shockwave player as IE doesn't support "plug-ins" as such, everything like that has to be run through active X for IE, so that could also be causing an issue.

Maybe you should try it on a different browser apart from IE. Although, every computer I've accessed this on so far hasn't had a problem, many of them using IE6 which auto installed the shockwave player when I went to that page so I can only assume that something is a miss at your end. Can you view other shockwave content? Let me know if you can access this, it's an old version of one of my sites: http://www.whatever.net.au/~cameron/KMB626/

FPS: 50
OS: Win XP (SP1)
CPU: Mobile P4 2.4 GHz
RAM: 512 MB SD RAM

FPS: 110
OS: Win XP (SP1)
CPU: Celeron 2.2 GHz
RAM: 512 MB SD RAM

FPS: 10
OS: Win 98
CPU: P2 MMX 500 MHz
RAM: 256 MB RAM

FPS: 30
OS: Win 98
CPU: P2 MMX 450 MHz
RAM: 512 MB RAM

Nice work, Drac. It makes very nice eye candy and I have quite a sweet tooth when it comes to that

. . : slicePuzzle

FPS:77-82
OS: Win98SE
CPU: AMD Athlon 1.0 @1.236(12*103)
RAM: 256 MB SD RAM at 133

__________________________
"Show me a sane person and I will cure him for you."-Carl Jung
Eagles may fly high, but beavers don't get sucked into get engines.

FPS: 13 (but if I play with the sliders, I could go from as low as 11 and all the way up to 22)
OS: Win98SE
CPU: Celeron 333MHz
RAM: 128MB

FPS: 45-60
OS: WinXP Pro
CPU: Intel P4 1.4 Ghz
RAM: 512 MB SDRAM (133)
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 7200 Pro

FPS: 65
OS: Win2K Pro(SP2)
CPU: 2.26 Ghz P4
RAM: 1024 MB
And a slow 56K

Am I the first Mac to report in?

Highest I got was 35 fps on the home eMac, lowest was about 21, OSX, 640 MB RAM

cool stuff Drac.

Hey, thanks Steve!

I've yet to test this on the Mac's at University, but it's good to hear there aren't any cross platform issues aside the usual performance problems with certain parts of the shockwave engine on the Mac. One of those being it's imaging lingo performance. Although, as far as I know, Macromedia are aware of a lot of these problems are trying to optimize the Mac version, at lest, they say they are.

A big thanks to everyone else as well. I don't need any more tests but feel free to keep posting your results/comments all the same. =)

I'll probably also turn this into some kind of screen saver at some point, also with the ability to play MP3's and have the visuals act with the music. Kinda like a win amp screensaver or something -- yeah, maybe, when I have the time. Hah.

I personally don't like screensavers that demand cpu usage. I know most of them do, and this is the reason why my current - and forever - screensaver is the default WinXP logo. Imo, it makes no sense to have a screensaver to save the monitor while burning the cpu.
I don't want to diminish the beauty of your work, it's really very nice, my daughters loved to keep looking at it - me too - but I just want to tell my opinion about high-demanding cpu SS.
Another side effect of these sort of SS's is that the fan atop my CPU goes to a higher rpm, making more noise (because of the increased heating). Otherwise, it's a very quiet cpu+fan.

Yes I can that last see page perfectly, the 'Vanilla' thing. Just to be sure I nstallled latest flash and shockwave players. Still the first page won't load.. confused:



[This message has been edited by Xpirex (edited 08-24-2003).]

Mozilla 1.4: ~50fps
Safari: ~58fps
Opera: ~44fps
IE 5.2: ~50fps
OS: X
1 GHz iMac.
1 GB Ram.

FPS: 17
OS: WindowsNT4 Workstation SP6
CPU: Pentium II 350MHz
RAM: 64 MB
Video Card: ATI 3D Rage Pro (Internal RAMDAC); 4 MB total memory; 1024x768 @ 85Hz (32bit colour)