1.8

General Discussion
1

Can anyone using P3D 1.8 tell me if the frame rate increases x2 or x3?

Of course I mean with an environment and objects on the screen.

Or better yet, a video would be nice.

The download keeps breaking for me…

2

You’re an optimistic one. :slight_smile:

Simply switching to Panda3D 1.8 isn’t likely to improve your frame rate at all. Actually, your frame rate could drop over 1.7, because the new 1.8 build is compiled with threading enabled, which adds additional overhead across-the-board.

But 1.8 provides additional features that, if you use them, can result in a frame rate improvement. x2 is optimistic, but possible, depending on your application. x3 isn’t realistic.

David

3

You know, I thought I did notice a slight drop in fps over 1.7.

Assuming I don’t need threadin a all, I don’t suppose there’s a way to disable this? I guess I’d have to recompile it myself ?

4

That’s correct, you’d have to compile it yourself. This is the classic dilemma between threaded and non-threaded applications–for a single-threaded application, it’s best not to have threading support at all, which means a recompile at a fundamental level.

Since there’s only rdb making the builds, we do have to keep a reasonable limit on the number of separate builds we provide. For a long time we provided a non-threaded (or, more accurately, “simple threads”) build as the default build, but people kept asking about doing threading (and plus we have the new threaded pipeline support), so it seemed like it was time to switch to a full-threaded default build instead.

David

5

No worries. Am I right that I can compile 1.8 with visual studio express 2010 or should I stick to vs 2008? (I assume it’s just a make panda flag to comple without threading?)

Thx!

6

Stick with VS2008. And you can use --override “SIMPLE_THREADS=1” to build with simple threading instead of full pipelined threading. (Or hand-hack makepanda.py to change this.) I think you might also need to set DO_PIPELINING to ‘undef’, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

7

Hi

After switch from 1.7.2 to 1.8.0 (Latest unstable)
I can see problem with CPU usage with my program and with Panda samples as well.
1.7.2 15% CPU 1.8.0 50% CPU

After few minutes but only sometimes ver 1.8.0 return to ‘normal usage’ ~15% - can’t say how I did it.

Is it related with multithreading or my 1.8 is not enough fresh ( how to check Panda build number)

pstats display almost red stripe - drawing

window1 = 18.3863 ms
  dr_0 = 1.44373 ms
    opaque = 1.38806 ms
  dr_1 = 0.375003 ms
    unsorted = 0.343546 ms
  dr_2 = 0.0357032 ms

I was sure that dr_0+dr_1+dr_2 should be equal window1.
I have identical Config.prc in both Pandas ( 1.7 -> 1.8 )

opengl/winXP

br,
ADX

8

That’s expected. Before 1.8.0, Panda could not take advantage of multiple cores. Now, it can, so that’s what you’re seeing.

If you don’t like Panda using up your processing power, then set “client-sleep 0.001” or something of the sort in your Config.prc.

9

Just a question…

If one were to use threaded taskChains with 1.8, in your opinion, should they expect an increase in fps?

10

That depends on what they do with those threaded task chains.

You may be able to increase your framerate easily by adopting a certain threading model, also see this page:
panda3d.org/manual/index.ph … r_Pipeline

11

What is the default threading model?

12

The default is not to use any threading model; as in, no attempt is used to run multiple rendering tasks concurrently. That is why you observe a slowdown in 1.8 by default.