GDevelop Performance issues, Please Read, Help and Stop Bad Information

GDevelop general
1

I firmly believe that everyone is right untill proven wrong, so i just spent a couple hours proving some people wrong, so that we can actually start piling up some useful information.

GDevelop has performance issues, their random with no obvious cause, different machines have different results no matter the specc, different boots of the same build on the same machine has different performances.

Common possible solution, it might be because its a laptop or the GPU not being recognized.

This is false.

I just spent the last hour looking up all the ways to manually activate my GPU to be sure it was working while previewing my game in GDevelop.

The result? No changes, one boot is perfect FPS the next the FPS is horrible.

Was the GPU really online? Yes, i checked the Task Manager, GPU was in usage at 33%, after closing the game down, it went to idle 1%.

This was both true during the good FPS and the bad FPS.

IT IS NOT A GPU ISSUE.

Its also not a memory or a CPU issue, got plenty of memory open and same with the CPU, both are properly engaged because… well the computer is running and everything is smooth except for the game.

This issues persists after Exporting the game into a finished build, both as a Desktop build or a Browser build in gd.games.

Im fairly certain its not a machine issue but an issue with how the engine interacts with it.

If you have any sort of usefull information about this, please leave it detailed in a post.

2

The idea is good, but “randomly” isn’t a good point to start the research for these issues, because randomly can be even caused to a Solar storm like the famous speed run of Mario 64. I never had these issues, only few times when i started a preview sometimes load fast and other times load really slow. When you have some issue should Make a “photo” of the entire system your are working right now and try to replicate it, only if you can replicate the issue you can find the real issue.

3

Thats the thing tho, its not a issue that you can pin point, it is “random”, it comes at random times, doing the exact same things, with the exact same machine on the exact same project with the exact same everything, hence it being so weird and hard to figure out.

The same everything has different results by doing the same everything.

I have a thread that i made on here with hours of testing on the same project, showing that some times it was good, some times it was bad on the same everything.

Some videos even showing that the performance just randomly changed from good to bad over nothing.

At one point i even had this thing where maximizing the game window would drastically improve performance, making the window the regular size would drop the fps back to bad. I went back and forawrd between the two and it kept doing it until it finally stopped.

So theres also something with the game resolution affecting it?

Anyways, please dont give me this “replicate and isolate” non sense, if i could of done it i would of, i spent weeks working on trying to figure this out, if i could of isolated it there wouldnt be an issue right now.

No disrespect, but for everyone about to say the same, keep the “turn it off and on” again to yourselfs.

Actual constructive information or idas are welcomed.

4

heres the thread im talking about

Feel free to go trough all the videos to see the performance just being… well random.

And before anyone goes saying it, no its not my events, its not a user thing.

If everything is the same, quite literally, but you get different results, then its something else.

At one point just because, i ran the profiler on a completly empty scene and noticed that empty events, goup labels and comments had quite the impact on performance, more still, as Points ponted out, was the renderer, that used a bunch of “ms” to render an empty black screen.

5

I have experienced these drops too, but I think this one might be attributable to the fact that maximized programs are given more performance allocation than windowed apps. Could be wrong though.

6

I can’t provide much guidance on this thread, but I can potentially speak to this one:

If you were on the event sheet when you started the preview, this one I believe is because the rendering proccesses are shared between the engine and the preview. Every additional box on the event sheet will take up render time.

Switching to the scene editor tab should eliminate that (specific) impact.

8

Im 99.9999% sure internet speed has no impacto on the preview, unless your using the online browser version? even then… no?

9

Ill give this a go to see if the renderer still acts funny. thanks! Ill keep you posted.

10

That is correct. Internet speeds will not impact local previews on the desktop client.

12

Please also keep in mind that, as a web game engine, GDevelop is compiled Just-In-Time and Garbage Collected by the V8 Engine, and performance can thus wildly depending on many different factors and the precise state of your system the moment V8 runs. V8 (and other JavaScript engines) use a lot of factors & heuristics to try and maintain a reasonable resource usage that does not overload the system, often even at the cost of performance of the program it runs. Tiny differences in the system can cause V8 to schedule more Garbage Collections (which each can cause small freezes, since it needs to pause the program’s execution to run) or to enable/disable optimizations on the compiled code.

GDevelop itself doesn’t have any kinds of heuristics, it is generally pretty deterministic. If the issues really do arise at random or can be made more or less likely with seemingly random little details like changing the window size, it might be coming from there.

I don’t know of a method to make V8 behave better, but I hope that potential lead might help you.

1 Like
13

Thanks for the big info and insight!

That checks out, it kinda describes how things tend to go when im doing performance testing.

In fact, resizing the window back and forward is one of the more reliable methods iv found to trigger the changes between “good” and “bad” performance.

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Its also none of the other stuff you said.

Events was the first thing i checked, my project is kinda heavy on events since its an RPG, but i´v optimized it so much that when its running well, the “events” only account for 1.30ms of the grand total.

Its also not the machine, or computer, theres people reporting performance issues with high end gaming computers.

Ill look into what @arthuro555 said and see if theres anything we can do as users…

15

I remember when I worked on a laptop the fps in the editor and games were like, 5 fps…

it was very confusing considering the laptop could run things at 60 fps that my desktop cant now