Performance issues with 14.1

[hoover]

Hi folks,

first of all thanks for all your hard work in keeping this sim alive!

I've been playing openttd on and off for a few years and recently updated from 13.4 to 14.1.

I run openttd in a VirtualBox VM on xubuntu 22.04 (the host system is win11 on a, ahem, company-provided notebook).

While performance has been good enough with versions 13.x, I find that 14.1 is more or less unplayable in this setup. The mouse cursor lags behind the movements, fps are very low and the system load higher than with 13.4.

Can somebody helpfully point me to what options I might change in order to achieve the same performance on 14.1 that I enjoyed in 13.4?

Thanks in advance & all the best,

Uwe

[Transportman]

Do you have that issue with the entire game (so also the main menu) or only during actual play? If it is the latter, OpenTTD has a Frame rate window that shows what it is spending time on, which might give you some information on what is causing the issue. If performance is really much worse between 13.x and 14.x it might be worth to report the bug on https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/issues.

[hoover]

Thanks for your reply transportman.

The game is laggy right from the start, so also in the main menu when the animated demo is running in the background.

I'll take a look at the timing / performance window. I understand it's a bit of a weird setup (running a native Linux game in a xubuntu VM that's running on win11 in VirtualBox) but maybe overall performance for "normal" environments will also improve if we manage to get to the root of this issue.

All the best,

Uwe

[jfs]

You can try turning off the Hardware Acceleration option in the Game Options window, see if that makes a difference.

[hoover]

Thanks for your suggestions!

Here are two screenshots from openttd-jgrpp-0.61 and 0.54, showing the difference in render times:


https://1drv.ms/i/c/983112bdd9d30eb2/EW ... Q?e=l1awT6


https://1drv.ms/i/c/983112bdd9d30eb2/Ee ... A?e=07K5Bm


Hardware acceleration defaults to "off" in both versions.

All the best,

Uwe

[jfs]

In the Game Options window, Graphics tab, what does it list as Current driver?

[hoover]

for both versions it's "sdl (x11)".

Cheers,

Uwe

[jfs]

Huh I wonder if it could then be a difference with the blitter used, but I can't quite remember if there is a convenient way to check that.

[skc]

for both versions it's "sdl (x11)".

Cheers,

Uwe

What happens if you edit the openttd.cfg file, and change the 'videodriver' setting from "sdl" to "sdl-opengl".
You have to have OpenTTD closed when you make this change though.
It made a VERY noticeable improvement for me on my Debian Linux system.

[hoover]

I checked my openttd.cfg and the videodriver entry is empty:

videodriver =

I entered sdl-opengl and now I have bad performance in both versions

Reverting the entry to the one above I now have the old situation again: ok performance in 0.54 / 13.x, bad performance in 0.61 / 14.1

Also, I tried all the different blitters listed in the --help output using the -b parameter for 14.1 / 0.61jggrp, but it didn't improve the performance in any noticeable way.

All the best,

Uwe

[hoover]

PS: FWIW, I just tried running 0.61 / 14.1 in an Ubuntu instance within WSL and performance appears to be excellent there.

Also, I checked the 3d acceleration settings for my other ubuntu VM in Virtualbox and it's enabled (using 128MB graphics memory).

All the best,

Uwe