Separate layers: 2D GUI and 3D game world

[Zo Kath Ra]

My computer is a bit old, and in a few areas, LoG2 becomes slow.
It's not just that the frame rate drops, but the GUI also becomes less responsive.

I don't really mind a low frame rate in a few areas, but an unresponsive GUI is annoying, especially when I'm trying to cast a spell.
The mouse cursor is not affected, by the way. Maybe because it's a hardware cursor?

Anyway, would it be possible to update the game world and the GUI separately?
- 2D GUI: updated at a constant 60 fps or even 120 fps
- 3D game world: updated at whatever speed the CPU/GPU allows

[petri]

This would need redesigning the game engine. It's not feasible, sorry.

[Dr.Disaster]

err .. is this still your hardware?

[Frenchie]

Are you gaming in full screen? If so, try a lower resolution in windowed mode. There might be a cpu tool that puts the game on the highest priority. As for upgrading to a newer Windows version above XP and adding more Ram I guess is about time...

[vlzvl]

I don't really mind a low frame rate in a few areas, but an unresponsive GUI is annoying, especially when I'm trying to cast a spell.
The mouse cursor is not affected, by the way. Maybe because it's a hardware cursor?

Anyway, would it be possible to update the game world and the GUI separately?
- 2D GUI: updated at a constant 60 fps or even 120 fps
- 3D game world: updated at whatever speed the CPU/GPU allows

That would not do a thing anyway. GUI, as 3D world, they're both made of 3D triangles, projected as 2D.
If you render a 3D scene having 10000 triangles and render separately a GUI consist of merely 50+/- triangles, you're not really achieving anything.
The way is to cut a lot of triangles (or improve the batch drawing method) from 3D world, plain simply, to give a chance to input handling as mouse, keyboard etc. to be responsive. This is because the input handling is framerate-restricted.
The mouse itself it's a hardware one if it's movement doesn't bound to framerate but it's response does (etc. click) in both software/hardware cursors.

[Zo Kath Ra]

err .. is this still your hardware?

It is, plus a graphics card
(the one I bought so I could play LoG1, a GTX550 Ti)

[Dr.Disaster]

err .. is this still your hardware?

It is, plus a graphics card
(the one I bought so I could play LoG1, a GTX550 Ti)

So it's an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (eight year old cpu), 2 gigs of RAM and an GTX 550 Ti.
Of course an older cpu might get under stress to instruct the gpu to draw several ten thousand triangles a second.

Yet some optimization might be possible. For example make sure you got all of your 2 gigs of real RAM for use, not just 1.75 or less as listed in that old dxdiag report. This does not have to end by closing unnecessary programs when playing. Check inside your BIOS that the onboard nForce GPU is disabled and it's once assigned portion of system memory is reset to zero. Also since you are running with WinXP swap enabled make sure it runs at the best speed possible. WinXP is not exactly a wizard in swap usage so do NOT let it control the size of the swapfile. Set a fixed limit like 2 gigs and have XP create it in the fastest area of your fastest drive without fragmentation (defrag first if needed). If in doubt of your disk's performance a fast USB stick can work wonders regarding swap.