[VX Ace jitter on map] I think I found out why. It's not VX Ace.

[_Shadow_]

@Hudell pointed out something important.

No matter what graphics card you got, RGSS3 of VX Ace will load CPU and not GPU.

That means that graphics card does not help VX Ace in general.

DO NOT GET CONFUSED.

What I state here, is that quality graphics cards can proccess redrawing smoother than cheap ones.

That doesn't have to do with many parallel events and scripts running at the same time. This is CPU only business.

That told, you can go on and read about my findings.

TL;DR; Version:

It isn't VX Ace's fault.

So most of the time people check RPG Maker VX Ace and Benchmark test it or test it in general, on a gaming PC.

Gaming PCs come with good graphics cards, so that was under the radar for that reasoon.

Good graphics cards MAKE a difference on VX Ace performance.

REQUESTING:

Feedback from expensive graphics card users to confirm my findings.

Feedback from people having jitter issue  to also confirm my findings.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Long analysis:

I still got my old Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Proccessor 3800+ at 2GHz.

CPU and motherboard didn't changed.

RAM also makes no difference here.

WHAT I WAS EXPERIENCING:

You might also see that in many videos on youtube.

If you scroll on the map, and have some buildings, you might clearly see the map graphics being repainted on screen, in a way that makes them blurry.

This looks pretty bad.

What made me research on that, was the curiosity I ahd about why it happens to me and not to other people.

For instance, @Archeia has not such an issue. Other people have the same issue though.

Some of them have AMD CPUs, some others have Intel CPUs.

Some Intel CPU systems work fine and some Intel CPUs have the same problem my AMD system has.

So I assumed it's not about the CPU at all. And I was right!

Most gaming PCs contain a good graphics card, like an NVIDIA GE Force with CUDA cores.

My cousin had an Intel PC with such a graphics card. VX Ace was performing all right.

I had an AMD system with a cheaper graphics card. I had the problem.

A week ago, I got an old PC for scrap (the owner was getting a brand new, and as a free tech support guy for 5 years, I deserved a gift I suppose).

I was a lucky guy, since it contained a Ge Force 9800 GTX

I also formatted my PC and reintstalled everything, did any needed updates, installed Nvidia drivers needed and I am ready to go.

RPG Maker now works incredibly different.

Bottomline?

Minimum requirements can be just a somple graphics card.

I strongly recommend you though to recommend users use a good graphics card, since it seems  it redraws on screen graphics faster that a cheaper one.

How to check if you got a good graphics card:

It should look like this (from tomshardware.com):

and not like this  (from asus.com):

Simple enough.

Note that both are Nvidia. One is G FORCE and the other is... GE FORCE

GEE that E make a whole lot of difference.

I realized that GE Force expensive good graphics cards make VX Ace run smoothly, while my cheap graphics card showed the games in a lame jitter blurry way. 

REQUESTING:

Feedback from expensive graphics card users to confirm my findings.

Feedback from people having jitter issue  to also confirm my findings.

If that's the case, it's good news. It is a hardware issue, and by just recommending appropriate hardware, we can be sure that users will have a good experience with our game playing it to appropriate systems.

BD

SCROLLING WITH JITTER:


SCROLLING WITH NO JITTER:

(trees jitter a little but I am not sure if that's because of the recording software or the game itself)

 

[Hudell]

I thought RPG Maker didn't even use the Graphics Card?

 

[_Shadow_]

You are absolutely right.

It doesn't. It makes no difference if you put many stuff on RGSS3 to do.Don't get confused though, RGSS3 and eventing overloads the CPU not the GPU.

It MAKES difference though when your systems tries to do smooth stuff on screen. I am not sure why it works better.It seems though that redrawing the map is done better with better graphics cards than the one I had.

I had that one:

 

 

 

Now I got this:

 

 

[AceOfAces_Mod]

Confirmed.

An ASUS X51RL laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo T5520 @ 1.60Ghz and ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 seems to lag a lot (not just jittering) while a Lenovo G580 Laptop with Intel Core i3 2328M with it's on-die GPU (Intel HD Graphics 3000) runs almost flawlessly. Maybe because I am using a Anti-Lag script, but there wasn't a big change. I think that they use Software backend for graphics processing, while other engines use Direct3D or OpenGL hardware acceleration (if it had hw acceleration, it would have included DirectX DLL files on every project).

 

[cabfe]

So, it's the 2D internal engine/drivers of the cards that are to blame?

Although it's not under the spotlight compared to 3D performances, all graphic cards are not equal about 2D rendering too.

In theory, using the high-res DLL should make it more obvious to observation.

 

[_Shadow_]

As I said, I am not sure why, but it seems that better graphics cards perform better on graphics.

You can still experience lag if you will overload the CPU with too many events to handle or too many scripts to handle.

No jitter though.

 

[Shaz]

If that was the case, wouldn't everybody be having the same issues? The games I have looked at where the developers are having these issues, I am not seeing them on my computer.

 

[_Shadow_]

@Shaz many people have such an issue. I just couldn't find the old thread to post so I made a new. By the way, does your PC have a good graphics card or a cheap default one? If you got a good or new graphics card, you can't really have such a problem.  That's probably why you don't experience that issue.

It is not the game that makes the issue.It is the PC that runs it Shaz.That's what I am telling here. I made this thread because people blamed VX Ave for that jitter, me included, but it's not VX Ace really but how graphic cards works probably, since more expensive cards eliminate the problem.

This video is captured by such a PC. See the map movement? The tiles on the map become blurry as the map moves.

Here is one epic and fantastic game from Aldorela, recorded though on a PC that does not make so smooth map redrawing.

That's not because of XP I suppose but because the market is full of systems with cheap graphics cards and because people haven't upgraded their systems for years.You probably got a good system, or a graphics card that is so new that works fine anyway.My old ASUS was a cheap 7 years old card. What were you expecting.Thing is many people have old hardware that plays 3D games and they assume that the same card will work with VX Ace fine. That is a myth on some cases.And that is how that problem emerged.

 

[Shaz]

But didn't the people in those threads also say they didn't have a problem running other RM games? We had all spent some time trying to figure out whether it was the game, the engine, or the hardware, and many of us posted our system specs. I'm on a different PC now (laptop) so can't quickly look up the specs on the machine I was using at the time.

 

[_Shadow_]

I am not talking about lag. I refer to that jitter. In my experience, if you got an issue on one game with map graphics being blurry, you got it with every game too. Also if you got no jitter issue with one game, you got no issue with other games too. The most common mistake, is people confusing lag with that blurry jitter. It is two different things. I don't recall though any person saying that some games had the jitter while others did not. I clearly remember though coming do a dead end with the following cases:

Assumption: Intel CPUs work better with VX Ace.

My PC (that had issues) had an AMD/

Then another member jumps in the conversation stating he has an Intel CPU and he has the same issue.

Dead end about CPUs.

What about graphic cards then?

Well some people having RADEON have issues.

Also people having NVIDIA had issues.

Dead end.

But HEY! We overlooked something. Having an NVIDIA doesn't say much.

So after I upgraded my system, VX ACE works incredibly fine.

I wish I could show you that live but I unfortunately can't.

 

[Shaz]

Where did I say anything about lag? I know you weren't talking about lag.

 

[_Shadow_]

Where did I say anything about lag? I know you weren't talking about lag.

 I am so sorry. Did I made you feel that I was refering to you actually? I was not.

Of course YOU didn't talked about lag anywhere @Shaz. You would never get confused on that thing. 

But most of the people get confused. I wasn't talking about you.  

When I was writing my reply I had in mind the replies of many other members confusing the terms on the previous threads.

In the begining I was confused too.  Then someone used the word "Jitter" and I said "YEAH THAT'S THE CORRECT WORD!" 

People might talk about a game that lags and then say other games don't. People might play a game in their PC and work fine, while on another it might lag. When they read jitter, they might get confused thus post on that old threads we were discussing the issue, saying that "they had a game with jitter but another game wasn't", while what they were trying to refer to was lag. Or they might not been able to tell the difference between lag and jitter (especially if they had no jitter at all).

Since lag is caused by CPU overloading most of the time (we know that GPU is not involved on helping heavy scripts to resolve and parallel proccesses etc etc) it is something completely different.

If you got jitter, you got it for all games. If you don't have jitter, you got only lag on some games. It is a boolean situation.  I mean, if you got jitter for one game, you got it for EVERY game. That's what I was refering to.

But didn't the people in those threads also say they didn't have a problem running other RM games?

That's what I think. Those other people might never had jitter problem at all. Just some laggy games really but they might got confused with the terminology or the detection (it's not the easiest thing to determine right?)

You know you got jitter if you make a brand new empty project, put some grass, double the vertical size of the map, draw a few houses in the middle of it and on the top and bottom of it, and then just test play the map. If the houses jitter you got that jitter. NO lag at all. 

 

[Shaz]

lol - I assumed you were replying to me because your post was directly below mine and you didn't use anyone else's @name Sorry - my mistake

 

[_Shadow_]

lol - I assumed you were replying to me because your post was directly below mine and you didn't use anyone else's @name Sorry - my mistake

Well it is my bad, cause I wasn't clearly refering to them.

Anyway, I hope we will get some more feedback on this topic from other users.

@ACe_of_aces_mod confirmed that already, but one person only is not enough really.

I also wish I had more hardware to test VX Ace on. 

 

[Gothic Lolita]

I don't want to burst your bubble, but I'm using that graphiccard:
http://www.amazon.de/Zotac-NVIDIA-Grafikkarte-PCI-Speicher/dp/B009L901NW

And what you call jitter is called tearing in the PC/technical aspect.
It can be corrected with any graphiccard, you only have to turn on VSYNC in the driver options.

My problem is no tearing, it's frame rate drop that get's corrected by Zeus Fullscreen++,
After installing it, I get 60 FPS with 544*416 Pixel. Without it, I got 24 FPS on a resolution of 544*416 Pixel
Using the High-Res DLL, doesn't matter much, it only increases the framerate by 4. On the 60 FPS one, it doesn't change.
Because of VSYNC, without VSYNC I get about 240 FPS in VX ACE and Zeus Fullscreen++ else, see above and tearing.

With the performance drop it has to do with the DirectX version you are running. Windows 8 and 10 runs allready on DirectX 12.

Windows 7 still runs on DirectX 11. If the DirectX version get's newer, some .dll's that are no longer used by games get deleted, while other .dll's be added.
After all mostly it's affected by Windows version and what hardware you are using.

Intel processors using a technology, where the GPU is actually on the CPU, same goes for the AMD A2-10 series.

Often heard there is no problem with these. But may we are all wrong and it has to do with the RAM you're actually using, or the mainboard.

CPU are only INTEL or AMD.
But on GPU it's allready hundrets of manufacturers like MSI, Gainward, Zotac and on and on...

I don't believe it's a software problem from Enterbrain, it's for sure a Hardware problem with specific manufacturers.
Else I only can think of an Operating System issue. (\s/)

 

[_Shadow_]

Intel processors using a technology, where the GPU is actually on the CPU, same goes for the AMD A2-10 series.

Often heard there is no problem with these. 

Errr... this sounds like... well this makes no sense at all. Can you please explain me what are you talking about? 

You probably refer to the opposite. Using GPUs for CPU workload, like CUDA cores for number crunching.

No. RAM issue is negative. I got same modules and not that jitter or tearing if you like anymore. 

About Operating System issue, I give negative to that too.

As for manufacturers and also your card, some MODERN graphics cards, even the cheaper ones (the one I showed is 7 years old) might be small but strong enough to do the job, so you don't burst any bubble really.

"And what you call jitter is called tearing in the PC/technical aspect. 

It can be corrected with any graphiccard, you only have to turn on VSYNC in the driver options."

That could be a solution probably; Or not. VSYNC is a 3D graphics setting, so I am not sure of your tearing is actually what I am talking about, since VX Ace doesn't produce 3D graphics at all. But maybe it might reduce tearing on 2D...

Can you test VX Ace with and without VSYNC on your system please? If you see any significant difference on a new project with a big map with let's say 3 houses, then I can accept that as a new piece of info that might solve this case.   

Frame rate drop because of CPU most of the time, when it comes to VX Ace.

 

[AceOfAces_Mod]

Windows 8 and 8.1 use DirectX 11.1 and 11.2 respectively. DX12 is exclusive to Windows 10.

The game runs on a software backend, so most of the processing is done from the CPU regardless if the GPU is on the CPU's die or not. Intergrated GPUs work as a normal GPU, but with the advantage that the CPU won't have to use it's PCI Express in order to comunicate with it, thus speeding up the processing. Even if you use V-SYNC, it doesn't change that (plus you'll deal with tearing when the GPU can't feed the monitor fast enough). Also, this is not considered technology, it's architectual design.

And while DirectX may help, only the maximum supported API will be used. Say, if you have a DX9 card, but your OS supports 12, it will use DX9 API max. It's not going to help much as the  API was designed for compatibility thus any improvements DX12 bring, they will be small to none. And why we still need DirectX Redists? Compatibility, that's what! Try to run Unreal Gold on the newest PC that you have.

Intel was making GPU since the 90s (I think they were called Intel Extreme Graphics), so they are also GPU manufacturers. MSI and other take NVIDIA's and AMD's GPU and modify them to create variations of a GPU.

 

[_Shadow_]

"Even if you use V-SYNC, it doesn't change that (plus you'll deal with tearing when the GPU can't feed the monitor fast enough). Also, this is not considered technology, it's architectual design."

Confirmed by test on hardware. VSYNC though must be activated or you get that jittering or tearing or whatever.

CPU is the most important thing here.

But still @Gamer Luna suggested something good. It's good to check if we got VSYNC ON, Adaptive or OFF by default.

 

[Hudell]

"Even if you use V-SYNC, it doesn't change that (plus you'll deal with tearing when the GPU can't feed the monitor fast enough). Also, this is not considered technology, it's architectual design."

Confirmed by test on hardware. VSYNC though must be activated or you get that jittering or tearing or whatever.

CPU is the most important thing here.

But still @Gamer Luna suggested something good. It's good to check if we got VSYNC ON, Adaptive or OFF by default.

On the game.exe settings, VSYNC is off by default.

 

[_Shadow_]

On the game.exe settings, VSYNC is off by default.

REALLY? Where do I set this ON from?