FPS Problems! - AVS Forums

Riptide183

25th September 2002 21:58 UTC

FPS Problems!
Ok, first thing you'll prolly say is, is your computer any good? Yeah it is, i play 3d games in high resolution and framerate and the AVS's before i installed winamp 3 ran smooth and looked clean. Now after installing winamp 3 and getting some AVS's like EL-VIS and Desibel my framerate sucks and im only running at like 640x480. I have a 1.33Ghz T-bird GeForce 3 and 256 MB DDR RAM and im running Windows XP, I shouldnt have any problems. Any suggestions by anyone would be appreciated :D Thx

jheriko

25th September 2002 22:16 UTC

The problem is winamp 3, winamp 3 is slow, especially if you have desktop alpha enabled and some complex skin over it all. Your graphics card has zip to do with AVS, but nice to see you have a GF3... nice and ready for Doom 3. Your processor is roughly the same as mine and I get some quite crappy fps using winamp 3.

The other thing is are you running fullscreen 640x480 with or without pixel doubleing because no complex presets run very well in that sort of resolution without pixel doubleing turned on, regardless as to which version of winamp you are running.

skupers

26th September 2002 20:09 UTC

I actually think there isn't much difference between Winamp2 and Winamp3. Well, at least at my computer they run both at around 35 fps with the same settings (320*200, no pixel doubling, no wait for retrace, the slider at the most left, no overlay mode, and same Render thread priority as winamp). I do have two tips:

Did you uncheck "Wait for retrace" in the settings/display options of AVS? This usually saves me around 8 fps.

And if nothing helps you can setting the Render thread priority higher, but I don't recommend that. It makes any other programs really slow.

UnConeD

26th September 2002 21:07 UTC

Read the FAQ, AVS is slow and doesn't benefit from a lightning fast video card. Only your cpu affects it.

damienplus

27th September 2002 05:43 UTC

It is not your computer my friend!

Winamp moderator SAWG just informed me that AVS is a total joke and nobody uses it. Apparently its an ancient piece of code and why anybody programs for it I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine...

I think nullsoft should find a way to optimize it so all of those wonderful presets can be of some use. They should probably just yank it, I had the same reaction as you:

IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY COMPUTER?

Jaheckelsafar

27th September 2002 06:11 UTC

If you don't like it, don't use it damienplus.

There are faster prestes out there, but none have the same customizability as AVS. Milkdrop is pretty cool and pretty fast, but I don't know if there's a winamp 3 version of it.

jheriko

27th September 2002 13:32 UTC

Originally posted by damienplus

Winamp moderator SAWG just informed me that AVS is a total joke and nobody uses it. Apparently its an ancient piece of code and why anybody programs for it I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine...

:mad:

Okay... you just came into the AVS forum (which, by the way, is filled with the people who love and make AVS presets) and started slagging of AVS and the people who make the presets with unparalleled ignorance.

:mad:

That explains why you can't see the point of it, you don't have the intelligence to know when to keep your mouth shut, so you probably don't have enough intelligence to appreciate the mathematical and artistic power of AVS, which happens to be the *ONLY* visualisation that you can custom code yourself to any decent extent.

:mad:

You should stick to watching those cack, spyware filled, badly coded, uninspired and unimpressive visualisation plugins that the brainless gorms of this world seem to find so mesmerising.

:mad:

I'm going to go kill something now.

damienplus

27th September 2002 17:30 UTC

Jheriko,

I am being a pain in the ass--I will admit that, and thanks for responding.

And I do agree that the programmability of AVS is marvelous and has fostered a great community!

But at some point we loyal Winamp users want something we can show off with, some trippy full screen goodness. I find the AVS situation disheartening because it is allowing great work to go to waste. When I throw parties with Winamp pumping a hundred gigs of MP3s off of my music server to three rooms in my house I like to throw something up on the screen that will be impressive. Stuff like Milkdrop really does the trick but gets old fast. I would just love to access the thousands of incredible AVS presets in something larger than a window the size of my tongue. But I cant because even my fastest PC (1.6) wont do AVS with a good framerate at hi-res fullscreen deep-color resolution.

Instead of getting angry with me why don't you tell those llama sucking boneheads at nullsoft to pay someone to rewrite that crap. AVS for the masses, for posterity. This is not me bitching for the sake of bitching--I am trying to motivate y'all to reach a goal. Those presets will live one day, just you wait. And it will be sooner than a 10 GHZ PC...

peter

27th September 2002 19:47 UTC

Instead of getting angry with me why don't you tell those llama sucking boneheads at nullsoft to pay someone to rewrite that crap. AVS for the masses, for posterity. This is not me bitching for the sake of bitching--I am trying to motivate y'all to reach a goal. Those presets will live one day, just you wait. And it will be sooner than a 10 GHZ PC...

first. if you keep insulting us, why should we even bother ?
second. "pay someone to rewrite that crap". this has been done already, go get milkdrop, thank you.
third. AVS is slow because of the way it works, it can't be made faster ("faster" as in "capable of using video hardware acceleration") without breaking current preset system, low-level code is already optimized to death. but oh well, you probably know better.

ah, and i almost forgot. crossposting, whining on the same topic on all forums, flaming developers, and generally being an ass is not welcome here. and no, clicking "report post to a moderator" wont help you in your "holy war", spamming us is not welcome either. your user account has been banned, your other posts are being removed, and this thread is locked.

have a nice day.

migmigmig

27th September 2002 19:51 UTC

JES** MO*****CKING **R*** ON A FLA**NG POPSI**E ST*CK!

You run AVS at 640x480? You deserve your computer to be spanked.

I'm not here to get into a pissing contest with anyone over their machine specs, but I run a Dual Athlon MP1800+ rig for L2 cache coherency -- only thing dualproc does to AVS is make it look like I'm using an MP1800+ with 512k L2 cache. Brennan might have a faster AVS rig than me with his Xeons. Maybe. RDR isn't as good as DDR for AVS, but he's doublewide.

Anyhow, on close to the fastest AVS rig you'll goggle my stuff plays at 32fps at 320x240. That's it. And I'm actually absurdly pleased with how well it plays on this hardware.

AVS is a RAM BOTTLENECKED APPLICATION. Ie: rule 1) when you say what speed video card you have and you complain about AVS, everyone instantly realizes you're full of shit and you probably will have no leg to stand on in this argument to begin with.

Once you get to about 1GHz, your processor is nowhere near the bottleneck anymore, except for how it actually talks to main RAM and how much cache it has inside of it. Personally, I run my stuff even "deeper" than everyone else, because I think the algos and the beats are more important than the raw framerates, but I'm not so stupid as to try to go above 320x240.

SAWG, I'm sure, told you no such thing. Or sawg deserves to have himself spanked for it. AVS is, as far as "raw performance" goes, probably some of the most original and well tuned code on the _planet_. While the interface could use an overhaul, AVS is at fairly peak performance.

AVS isn't going to magically go any faster until the bozos who build computers make QDR-RAM. Or start shipping 8M L3 cache systems like on the apple G4's now (Opterons should kick ASS for AVS in about 6mos with the 2nd gen motherboards -- celerons will not).

Once you see memory bandwidth (or L2 cache sizes) quadruple, you'll be able to play your AVS at 640x480. And then you'll find that they look ugly as sin at 640x480 because the human being who wrote them probably wrote them for 320x240 and AVS played back at a different native res than they were programmed for are highly suboptimal, too.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please spare me the "but it has to go faster" routines. I get enough grey hairs listening to people talk about how wonderful it'll be when they make it go slower than it does now.

Wheee.

Oh, by the way, just to brag at you and make you feel small and useless, I also have a nice big video projector to play with my AVS and put it full screen up on the wall when I throw parties. I'm still only rendering at 320x240 native resolution, but I'll BET some of you other kids besides me are smart enough to realize how to show full screen on your computer and still only render at tolerable res. There's actually 2 or 3 different ways to do it, you can even make it be your desktop underneath your icons if you wanna get extra scary uber tricky with it.

So, maybe, if you'd have said "hey, AVS looks cool, but I'm having problems getting it fullscreen without losing performance" then people could have helped you.

Maybe people might, still.

Maybe if you wanna believe that we're crappy programmers who just foisted this terrible hack onto society, well, you're welcome to do that, too. We're certainly not going to be able to stop you.

But if you're correct, then we can't do much to help you, there, either, now, can we?

Sorry. Oh well. Guess we can't help you after all. Thank you. Drive through.

But thanks for wasting my time this morning, I don't get to write enough vitriolic forum posts these days.

mig
"llama sucking bonehead 3rd class."