Frame rates!

[construct]

Frame rates!

Ok, Diablo 2 is not a graphically intense game by far. Heck, the game has to be at least 6 years old, meaning while in development they were using technology as old as 8-10 years ago, depending on when development was started.

By the looks of the game, everything is 2D - if I had to guess I would say they used .gif palettes that swap around on a billboard as your character faces different directions, and spells and other animations are nothing more than glorified sprites.

SO WHY THE HECK IS MY FRAMERATE CRAWLING AT 6FPS DURING BAAL RUNS?!
[/sarcastic frantic yelling]

I mean c'mon, I have a cable connection maxing out at 10 Mbps, a GeForce 4 128 MB video card, an AMD Athlon 1300 and 256 MB of RAM - well over the requirements listed on the box!

:scratch:

 

[Merick1]

Diablo was made to work with that one video card, and doesn't work as well with anything else.

 

[construct]

Which video card is that?

 

[Merick1]

*Goes and looks at the battle.net forums*

nVidia

 

[Suo]

Bad programming mostly. Since they allocate the minions in to one memory stack or something, it isn't able to handle the flood of minion spawns in the throne. Same thing is with revive necros and other times when multiple monsterlike creatures are spawned at the same time.

 

[construct]

Heh, I see. I didn't know Blizzard would go and develop a game around a single company's video card line. Is this common?

*Goes and looks at the battle.net forums*

Sorry for askin', I figured you knew right off the top of your head, otherwise I would have looked myself.

Bad programming mostly.

Yeah, that's what I have been thinking. I can't really complain, it's not like I can do better. I'm just curious as to what the heck the engine is taking so long to calculate.

 

[Suo]

Yeah, that's what I have been thinking. I can't really complain, it's not like I can do better. I'm just curious as to what the heck the engine is taking so long to calculate.

I'm mostly guessing from my experience in game programming. Since it seems Blizzard designed DII in the time when some people didn't have 3D-accelerators, they decided to make a game which could work even without 3D-accelerators. Now when most people have a lot better computers, the possiblity to play without 3D-accelerator is somewhat a disadvantage.
The monsters are stored in to the memory as sprites in differenct angles and positions. The software tells the game what part of the memory's "bitmap" is to be "blit " in to the video buffer to be displayed. Since many similar monsters spawn at the same time, the game's limited resources in the graphics allocation have to sacrifice computer time to actually blit the image to the video buffer therefore causing lag.
Or something. Possibly didn't explain it like I was supposed to.

 

[Usufruct]

They used 3Dfx Glide as the video technology when they created Diablo 2. There are several glide emulators you can try using, but if you want the absolute best framerate in Diablo 2, you need to get a Voodoo card.

You'd get your max FPS on a toaster, if the thing had a voodoo in it.

 

[Ryu_Khan]

I just bought a Voodoo5 5500 128 meg AGP card off of Ebay for $20 so I could play D2 at a better frame rate.

And before you say "why would you buy a 3 year old video card," I should mention that my current card is a 5 year old ATI All-in-wonder Pro 128, with only 16 megs of VRAM :lol:

 

[skihard]

I laugh in your general direction sir. I do so because my back up computer has a Voodoo card in it and I often times fire it up to play on because I think it has better playability for D2.

to the original poster...Blizzard calls out the specs for WOW as requiring an nVidia card for best performance. nVidia bought out Voodoo because Voodoo had better cards at the time but was in financial trouble, it was a battle between Glide and Direct 3D, Direct 3D won out but not to the betterment of alot of games in development at the time. Newer games are made with either the Radeon or nVidia in mind now and run best on the card the developer recommends, although some patches try, sometimes good, sometimes not so good, to address both cards.

 

[Merick1]

Does nVidia make VooDoo cards or did I miss something?

 

[skihard]

No the company that developed and produced Voodoo cards was in trouble with finances (bad management) and was struggling to continue development of new cards, nVidia seeing that if Voodoo were to become stable again would potentially out do their cards, offered a buy out of Voodoo....in doing so Voodoo became no more and Direct 3D won the War...

 

[construct]

No the company that developed and produced Voodoo cards was in trouble with finances (bad management) and was struggling to continue development of new cards, nVidia seeing that if Voodoo were to become stable again would potentially out do their cards, offered a buy out of Voodoo....in doing so Voodoo became no more and Direct 3D won the War...

Well that explains a lot - you learn something new everyday. Thanks for the replies - I was kind of wondering why Voodoo just disappeared. I should probably read slashdot more often :idea: .

The monsters are stored in to the memory as sprites in differenct angles and positions. The software tells the game what part of the memory's "bitmap" is to be "blit " in to the video buffer to be displayed. Since many similar monsters spawn at the same time, the game's limited resources in the graphics allocation have to sacrifice computer time to actually blit the image to the video buffer therefore causing lag.

That's interesting, again I learn more. LMAO @ "Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato" (follow the link 'blit')