Given the structure of Disney’s Toontown game built with Python/C++ on the Panda3D engine, do you expect the main motherboard CPU(s) or the graphics card processor(s) to be the hardware limitation (or even RAM)?
IMHO, it seems that the MB-CPU is the limiting hardware. Can anyone confirm or shed light on this please?
Cheers,
jim
newbie
to make it short…your question cant be answered precisely since there is no precise answer.first of all, the entire hardware is your limit. which part of it depends on your machine AND the application itself. sometimes the gpu is your bottleneck, sometimes its the cpu, sometimes it might be our harddisk-seek-time, or the architecture of a data-bus. it always depends what you do and how you do it.
panda comes with a great tool to track down bottlenecks. so usually, its pretty easy to find and solve those problems.
Agreed with Thomas; any part of your hardware could be causing bottlenecks on some application. Toontown, in particular, is rather lightweight as far as games go; low poly models, billboards for trees etc.
Thanks Thomas and rwhughst. Let me word the question differently, if you had $xxx to upgrade a PC that would only be used for Toontown (TT), what hardware would you upgrade?
This is a hypothetical, but I am trying to get a sense of how well TT is coded to maximize the CPU and GPU (or what is the computing load/balance between the two). It “seems” like changes to the GPU do not translate into significant TT performance improvements. I am wondering if Disney did this intentionally (i.e. code TT or even the Panda3D engine to utilize the CPU more heavily) to capture a wider audience, especially given the low poly models, minimal networking needs, etc needs of TT.
Thoughts?
i dont know about toontowns inner codings. guess drwr might be able to help you to answer the “what tt demands from your hardware”.
all i know is that disney already targets hand-me-down hardware which are in children hands. given todays pc-average upgrading might not even be neccessary.
i’m pretty sure that TT balances the load as good as possible. the guys who wrote it know what they where doing after all 
btw… if you dont say what hardware is in there, noone will be able to tell you what to upgrade 
if you have a 500mhz cpu+geforce9600gtx… i’d upgrade the cpu… usualy. you would upgrade the slowest part of the machine anyway.
just my 2 cents
Thomas and Roger are right on the money.
There’s not a particular CPU/GPU balance that Toontown is targeting; but it is designed to perform well on low-end hardware in general, which means it doesn’t make heavy demands of either your CPU or your GPU. This also means that if you’ve already got a decent GPU, then upgrading it isn’t likely to have a huge impact on your Toontown experience; on the other hand, if you’ve already got a decent CPU, then upgrading that won’t change much either. Of course this all depends on what you’ve already got.
(Actually, I’d hazard a guess that any graphics card which actually includes a GPU should be more than adequate. Some older, inexpensive integrated cards do not have an onboard GPU as such, and require the CPU to do all of the heavy lifting of vertices. If you’ve got one of these, then upgrading either CPU or graphics card would have a similarly beneficial effect.)
If you’re not happy with your Toontown experience and are looking for an upgrade to improve it, I couldn’t tell you what to upgrade without watching Toontown run on your machine under PStats. But any modern computer, even a very inexpensive machine, should be able to run Toontown without breaking a sweat. (Not sure about some of these new “net books”, though.)
David