Optimazion issues... Whats with BlitzMax?!

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Optimazion issues... Whats with BlitzMax?!

Greetings,

I dont meen to spam my game arround the forum, but ye.. im working on it :-)

So, i ran into a new issue. That is when i use DX7 on a 64MB Intel onboard 2.4GHZ Celleron Laptop, with Flip 1, 60hz, 800x600, having used the DrawImage command about 650 times to make the screen, having added the HUD, i get a horrible 50FPS still dropping.
When i remove collisions i gain 5 FPS, when i remove the HUD i gain 5 FPS, and removing basicly any scrolling-correction code gains me 1 or 2 FPS. What im saying is. The way my RPG map is drawn, which exists out of 19*17 tiles, of which 2 layers are effectifly being printed (various tiles over various layers) takes quite a preformance hit. The map is read from a TBank over an TMap, where each tile is 1 byte. I use functions as Mod, Floor, Ceil, While/wend, to create run through the tiles and draw the map, which is gridbased in memory, however, scrolls seemless on the screen, pixel by pixel... Because of the scrolling i can not render it once (e.g. pre-render the map using pixMaps or TImage. Tried that, its horribly slow.) Please take in mind that altough the map looks as if it where once peace, it is made up of zones, those are the size of 19*17... Any ideas?

Im like surprised and: Wasn't BlitzMax supposed to OWN graphical wise? Wheres the Hardware Accelleration?
Ive seen other 2D engines using Hardware Accelleration doing a lot better. Or is it my laptop? If so, is the MHZ, or the limited memory (64MB) or the Intel Chipset? What about Mac's ?! They have 32Mb by default right? This game needs to run on older systems and crossplatform. Not to mention i still need to add "the game". what you see here is just the map and 2 oversized PNG's to make the HUD, which a.t.m. is static.

-Edit-:: Turning off PaintShop Pro which was running in the back, having a "clean" Windows XP Pro running, gained me 5FPS. So it runs at arround 55 FPS, whith all settings as described above.

-Edit2-:: Switching to windowed modes has me end up with 30FPS instead of 55. However, pressing CTRL+SHIFT+D to toggle the collisions layer visibility (cause the engine to draw arround 300 extra tiles) DIDNT make any difference? Which confuses me. Cause if the tiles where to be the preformance hit, then this action should have lowered the FPS. But i noticed that as i go Fullscreen, doing this, i indeed lose 5 FPS. Turning it off again gains me back 5 FPS.)

You can test yourself using the compiled version with configurator:
http://www.fantasaar.com/download/fantasaar%20alpha%200.0.8b.zip

-Edit3-:: Amazing, even switching between 16bit and 32bit makes a difference in FPS. When i set it to 16bit, it gains me 5FPS so it will run at 55FPS.

(UPS and FPS are definitely different, however, in THIS screenshot they happend to be the same. (FPS could as well have been 58 or 44)

Sledge

How are you plastering that text up there? Also, why a TBank and not a 2d array of bytes?