Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 11:13 pm

Am I the only one to notice this? Try the Ctrl-Q test in CMUD or zMUD on WinXP and then try it on Vista (if you have access to both). The Vista result is a *lot* slower than the WinXP result. This is just simple screen output and scrolling. Looks like Vista is trying to do something fancy in their display drivers that has slowed down text scrolling.

This really annoys me. I was working in Vista today and spend an hour trying to track down why CMUD was suddenly so slow. It was only after I tried zMUD 7.21 and got the same result that I confirmed that it was a Vista problem and not a CMUD issue. Another waste of time :(

There is no reason why normal text scrolling should be slower. It doesn't require any of the new Aero transparency stuff. Bad Microsoft!

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

From my experience with the beta vista technology and such: It's probably because Win32 apps that don't use the new Vista theming engine are converted into a bitmap frontend that you can scale up and down just like any other Vista app. This is probably the cause of your slow down.

I haven't really played with the final full blown version of Vista, so I can't say for sure though.

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 1:12 am

I would check that the fancy Aero stuff is turned off in Vista. It's a killer on the work machines I support that have the generic video set that comes in the Intel chipset.

Vista is using some new font technology ( Crystal Font or something like that) that does sub-pixel correction. Supposed to be sharper reading on LCD's when not at the panels native resolution. Honestly I cannot tell the difference.

Yeah the Vista drivers are 100% different and is part of why it's taking so long for truly mature drivers to come out. XP the driver is all part of the kernel. In Vista a small shim is in the kernel and all rest is actually a user app that loads at login. The new drivers seem like a hybrid of NT and XP drivers but basically trade speed for stability. At work I can live with more stability and protection against bad drivers/users/programs/developers ( in no particular order, all of them do crazy stuff given a chance).

Win 2000 took a good year+ before the drivers could come close to Win98se. Vista looks to be following an even longer curve. Network performance is even crazier than video, sometimes it blows XP off the road, other times it's so slow you want to kill it.

Sorcerer Joined: 13 Jan 2006 Posts: 715

Wanderer Joined: 09 Jun 2006 Posts: 62 Location: Florida

Your mileage may vary, of course. My CMUD runs faster on Vista than it does on XP (note that my Vista box has 1 GB more ram, but all of the other specs are almost exactly the same, so maybe that has something to do with it, though I doubt it). :)

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

The article at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173477.aspx might give some clues. "Existing graphics interfaces, such as GDI, GDI+, and older versions of Direct3D, continue to work on Windows Vista, but are internally remapped where possible."[Walbourn, 2006]. If I understand figure2 correctly it seems
everything goes through DirectX at some point in Vista, but I might be wrong. This usenet post I found is more interesting though as it seems more directly related to this issue http://groups.google.se/group/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.gdi/browse_thread/thread/10bfeac8ceca7df7/db5fa6eb6507a0f3. It states that drawing to the screen DC(0) is going to be slow but cMUD probably just paints to its own DC?

Edit: Do you have the latest 3D graphics drivers for your graphics card?

Novice Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 44

I actually switched to Vista just to try it out. I gained about 15 seconds on my Cmud control-q with my Lusternia system, so I promptly reformatted back to XP.

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 5:23 pm

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 6:11 pm

Well, the updated ATI drivers helped a bit, but the problem is still there. Here are my Ctrl-Q results:

zMUD 7.21:
Vista, default Radeon drivers: 18.2/7.4/7.3
Vista, latest Radeon drivers: 12.8/5.8/5.8
WinXP: 1.6/0.6/0.6

CMUD 2.13, WinXP: 3.6/1.7/1.7

So, that shows the scope the speed issues on my computer. I'm using the same computer for these tests...just booting either Vista or WinXP. As you can see, it's a pretty huge difference.

The difference between zMUD and CMUD is more expected just because CMUD has not had as much time to get optimized as zMUD has. I'm sure that CMUD speed will improve over the years.

But I mainly wanted to report this so that people were aware of how much difference Vista vs WinXP can make. It's possible that someone used to zMUD on WinXP will try CMUD on Vista and complain about the horrible speed. But as we can see, the exact same compiled application can run much slower on Vista.

Hopefully I'll be able to improve CMUD speed as I make it more of a native Vista app and learn the Vista tricks over the coming years.

Finally, as some people have already mentioned, your mileage might vary. It's possible that other video cards have better Vista drivers.

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 7:12 pm

While I was listening to one of the CodeRage sessions this morning, I put CMUD into my profiler and let it do Ctrl-Q a bunch of times. I discovered why Ctrl-Q is slower than zMUD! One of the optimizations made in zMUD was to cache the character width values to avoid calling the Windows GetTextExtentPoint API routine to compute the width of each string output to the screen. I learned a long time ago that the GetTextExtentPoint API routine is *very* slow.

In CMUD, I added support for styles. They were implemented in a way similar to how I handle MXP fonts internally. And with MXP, zMUD/CMUD does not used the cached width because the MXP font might be anything. So, even though the default text was a single style, it was calling GetTextExtentPoint to compute the width all the time.

I added a character width cache to each style in CMUD, and now the CMUD Ctrl-Q speed is much closer to the zMUD speed! This doesn't do anything to help the difference between WinXP and Vista, but at least now there isn't going to be any difference between zMUD and CMUD.

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 8:41 pm

Woohooo!!! Great find Zugg.

I don't have Vista, but I'm sure those who do will appreciate this. BTW when do we get a CodeRage conference update?

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

Yet another reason to stick with XP!

Sorcerer Joined: 13 Jan 2006 Posts: 715

Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2007 3:00 am

I'm buying a new computer soon (very soon now that Intel's Yorkfield is out - I'll probably wait for the new Geforce 8800 GTS though) and was kinda hoping that Vista SP1 will improve it enough to be worthwhile. It'll be nice to hear from the people with Vista once it's out (or from anyone who's already got a beta version).

Beginner Joined: 24 Mar 2007 Posts: 15

I'm kind of amazed at all the negativity about Vista myself. A lot of the stuff it breaks never worked all that well to begin with, and I suspect people will say 'this is what Vista should've been!' when the next Windows comes out, nevermind that without the changes made by Vista, it never would've been.

I went from dual booting in November to Vista only somewhere between April and June, and I'm definately not going to ever use XP again.

___
On an unrelated note, DEP isn't the only thing that can keep CMUD from starting on Vista, Windowblinds seems to do a swell job of it until you tell it to exclude CMUD from skinning.

Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2007 5:56 pm

Beginner Joined: 24 Mar 2007 Posts: 15

I was only implying that the way you draw stuff doesn't appear to work well with how Vista redirects graphics calls, not that CMUD doesn't work well.

My apologies if I worded that badly.

CMUD rocks. I'd used MUSHclients stale program for many many years before I paid for CMUD.

And yeah, I do tend to do a little hijacking, sorry :)

Registered this account a while back but decided posting just to say how much I liked CMUD was a little pointless.

As to Windowblinds, sadly I'm still on dialup so I don't have 2.13 yet...soon though.

Beginner Joined: 24 Mar 2007 Posts: 15

Still getting the exception on launch with Windowblinds on 2.13, but the app is still running after.

The error reporting hates my firewall apparently, oh well.

Beginner Joined: 12 Mar 2006 Posts: 22

Okay, so I'm doing this test on two different computers but here's what I get

Vista:
Cmud = 4.5-4.8
Zmud = 3.3-3.5

XP:
Cmud = 1.9 (almost all the time)
Zmud = .8-.6

The XP computer is almost 4 years old now and the Vista one is brand new.

Kinda makes me laugh...

Apprentice Joined: 03 Nov 2007 Posts: 132

I won't even say my CTRL-Q times on Vista with my full system going. But things seem to actually process fast enough so I don't mind the scrolling speed too much.

Beginner Joined: 24 Mar 2007 Posts: 15

Other than being at a loss as to what production environment that test would actually be relevant to, I'm not really going there.

For info about how the graphics code is redirected in Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager
http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa969540.aspx

Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2007 11:53 pm

The result is actually the number of "tenth" of seconds. So 9.9 is 0.99 seconds. Don't ask me why it's displayed like that ;)

Oh, and everyone should also be very careful with this. Do *NOT* bother reporting any Ctrl-Q speeds if you are loading your package. You should only be comparing speed using the blank session that you get when you first run CMUD. Otherwise, your Ctrl-Q speed is going to be completely dominated by your scripts and triggers and will have very little to do with the raw text scrolling speed of Windows itself.

Also keep in mind that changing your window size will also effect Ctrl-Q (since it has to scroll a different number of lines based on the window size). So when comparing zMUD to CMUD, make sure you are using the same window size, the same font, etc.

Beginner Joined: 24 Mar 2007 Posts: 15

Edited my post before I saw you answered. Mr. Green

Anyway, enjoy yourselves, I'm off to do something...or pretend to do something, whichever works.

I wish all the random crap I knew actually helped me get a real job, but hey. That takes effort!

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2007 12:10 am

Thanks for the links. I'll have to see if I can figure out an easy way to turn the DWM Composite stuff off or on from within the Vista UI to see if that makes a difference.

The Ctrl-Q timing test simply times how long it takes to write 1000 lines to the screen. The preference in CMUD called the "Refresh Amount" controls how many lines can be written to the current window before CMUD calls the ScrollWindowEx Windows API. This routine determines the maximum width of the lines on the screen to tell windows what portion of the current window to scroll. By default, this option is set to 5, so every 5 lines, CMUD is calling ScrollWindowEx and then painting the new lines.

Now, if Vista is refreshing it's own desktop from it's off-screen buffers too often and is slowing down program execution because if it, than that might explain the speed difference. In fact, this is a quote from the MSDN site that probably explains this slowdown:

Beginner Joined: 24 Mar 2007 Posts: 15

Well, at any rate, I hope the links help you work better with Vista. I know it aint easy getting used to sudden changes in how the OS does literally everything as far as output...I'm no developer myself mind you but I consider myself very well read on the subject :)

Because anything that affects developers of the programs I use affects me in the end. And, of course, I'm a major tech and gaming geek.
:)

Perhaps someday I'll actually use that knowledge, but development requires patience that I currently lack.