[pygame] Re: Fullscreen Performance

[Pete Shinners <pete@shinners.org>]

Gerrit Holl wrote:
> Resolution      %graphics   fps (+/- 5)
> 320x200         44          30
> 640x480         59          20
> 800x600         63          10
> 1024x768        76          7 (+/- 2)
this seems a little slow to me. i'm used to seeing the 
numbers one notch up for fullscreen scrolling with software 
based SDL pygame displays. so 640x480 would be around 30, 
not 20.

going to a hardware display will help you out considerably. 
i believe the 'fenyas quest' game previously mentioned on 
the list is enabling directx hardware for its rendering.

there's a couple things to consider when switching to 
hardware displays. first, the mouse goes funky on most 
platforms, so you'll need to provide your own graphic 
cursor. the other thing you absolutely cannot do with 
hardware surfaces with alpha blended blitting. just don't 
try, it will be scary slow. both these things don't look 
like they will be a problem for you, so you may give it a 
try. the first big step is passing FULLSCREEN|DOUBLEBUF to 
the set_mode() function. also be sure to call convert() on 
all your loaded and font rendered images, since that moved 
them onto the video card too.

maybe a year ago we had quite a discussion on tweaking out 
the maximum speed from a fullscreen tile engine in pygame. i 
remember we made some pretty nice progress on that. i also 
recall that running psyco helped a bit too. you may just 
turn that on and see if you get its 'free' performance benefit.

i'm sure we could once again attack your rendering main 
loop. is this for the pybrian project? if so maybe i'll take 
a peek under the hood.