Laggy Tornado on the TF1230

[DaveEddie]

Hi all. I have the TF1230 with 128mb fastram installed and I thought this would speed up Digital Integration's Tornado, but it's still very laggy even on low settings. Does it need an FPU or something?

[Seiya]

Tornado i think that use the worst 3D engine and not well support cpu acceleration as many other 3D flight simulators

[Daedalus]

The engine definitely does take advantage of faster CPUs, and there's a significant difference between a stock '020 and an '030 accelerator, but it reaches a point where the chipset is the bottleneck and at that point, the only way to speed it up is to draw less to the screen. Even with the detail turned down, there's a lot of drawing going on which unfortunately makes it slower than other, simpler flight simulators, which is a shame because it's otherwise a great game. I did find it reasonably playable all the same...

[Reynolds]

Even T.F.X. is more playable than Tornado. Honestly it never caught me to play rather than trying out if it is faster on higher CPUs when I've upgraded. Combat Air Patrol, Armour Geddon 1-2, F-15 Strike Eagle beats Tornado with rounds, sadly.

[kremiso]

if it does not take advantage having Fast RAM, maybe could be a candidate for the @jotd thread?

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=110556

EDIT
no, seems jotd already check for that :

https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...5&postcount=32

[Daedalus]

Yeah, that fits with my assessment - Tornado is doing a lot it seems, and while there may be some room for optimisation, that could be a significant body of work (e.g. maybe switching from using the blitter to using the CPU for rendering is something that could be done) and might not be worth it on an '030 since the CPU still has to do the simulation aspects and then also the rendering and the copying of the bitmap into chip RAM. Such optimisations are probably better suited to an '040 or '060.

TFX may be a little smoother these days, but it's had a lot of optimisation since then and was already built for CPU rendering from the start. When it was released however, it was slower on an '060 than Tornado is on an '030.

At the end of the day though, there's only so fast you can go with the chipset, even without using the blitter. Redrawing the entire screen can only be done a limited number of times per frame without changing the hardware.

[DaveEddie]

Thanks everyone for your input. I guess upgrading won't make a lot of difference. Perhaps one day someone like JOTD will come up with a patch to speed it up.