Bug#440377: eats laptop alive

[Jens Seidel]

tags 440377 +pending
severity 440377 wishlist
thanks

On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 06:50:49PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Package: hex-a-hop
> Version: 0.0.20070315-3
> Severity: normal
> 
> When I'm playing hex-a-hop, the ondemand governor scales my cpu
> frequency all the way up to 1.2 GHz.

I fully agree that it is currently far away from being optimal.
Considering the game it should even run on a 20MHz CPU I guess ...

> I found an old patch for this at
> http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=8902&page=1
> which I have cleaned up to work with this version. 

Ah, I hope there are no more patches flying around. This patch is
against a not yet GPLed game (from 2006) but considering the size it is
OK to apply it :-)

> This adds a 10 ms delay after each graphics update. This does not affect
> responsiveness any, and lets the game run only using 800 MHz here (quite
> close to the 600 MHz minimum CPU cpeed of my laptop). The only downside
> is that animations run marginally less smoothly.

It reduces the CPU usage from 75% to 50% on my Athlon(tm) XP 1700+.
The game is still very slow via remote X or in a valgrind session ...

> I wonder if the delay could be enabled as an option. A command-line option
> would be fine for me.

No, I do not like a command line option. It should be run well on much
older hardware. If we need to rewrite larger parts of the game to reach
this goal than we should do it (but not now, sorry) ...

I will now continue testing it on my SGI Octane workstation (big endian,
2 x R12000 CPUs, 270 MHz, o32 ABI :-). SDL doesn't like it but there is
still some hope ...

Jens