Introversion

And that is exactly why it's interesting; there's very little (basically 0) functional basis on which to expect those results, other than the lack of driver updates from nVidia, which to be honest is probably the main cause...

But isn't that the core problem? If the results were expected, IV would have fixed the problem before it occurred.
Unexpected issues are generally the only issues.

I don't pretend to understand the connection between the menu slowdown and the game speeding.
I just know it occurs, and how to avoid it.

Drivers might be a problem, but I did try to update them recently (a week ago). They didn't change anything; I don't know how old they are, but it's probably more of a hardware problem anyway.

Shwart!!

Definitely can't add any better since I've only owned a Radeon 9800 and a Geforce 7600 in the last few years, but I'll be interested in the answer when it emerges.

Really nice find Shwart!!.

Thank you.

Greeba wrote:Definitely can't add any better since I've only owned a Radeon 9800 and a Geforce 7600 in the last few years, but I'll be interested in the answer when it emerges.

First, how is the Geforce 7600 not superior to your ATI card?
Second, I didn't mean better necessarily, I just meant different. Any different card would give us a bit more information on why this does what it does.

Shwart!!

my shitty FX5200 in my spare PC gets 12-13 fps on the main menu WITH THE CRAZY GLOW OFF. In windowed mode at 640x480.

Just going to Help and Options, however, instantly increases the fps to 50. Returning to the main menu results in the return of the FPS drop back to 12-13.

????

What the hell is going on on the main menu that is different from the help and options menu? There is no such FPS drop on my laptop, with some crappy integrated radeon X1150 - It gets about 26 FPS at all times, once the effects turn themselves off. I asked you about this on IRC and you seemed to acknowledge this as if it was common knowledge - where did you post about this, because I don't remember reading it anywhere. Surely this is vital information? o_O

edit;

NeoThermic suggested that this might be related to the lettering system used by the menus (and possibly game in general) - at first I didn't believe him, because it seemed to have 0 relavence to the actual experienced FPS in the menus. However, I started to replace all the menu strings with the generally accepted term "Narf". This was a slow process so I looked to see if it was making any progress. Main menu, reading:

Narf
Narf
Narf
Narf
Update Available
Credits

Narf

25 FPS. With menu effects on. Menu effects on was getting something like 2 FPS a few moments ago, but this may have been related to the fade in effect - either way, same menu with the normal strings gave 12 FPS with effects off. Either way, changing strings to read "Narf" should have precisely 0% effect on performance. Sooooo wtf's going on there? Screenshots provided via FRAPS!

I switched to full screen for these to try and coax the menu effect into turning off for the Narf version, hence why these FPS are a little different as those I quoted above;

What.
I'll try to confirm...
EDIT 2: Confirmed. That makes no sense.
It doesn't have as drastic of an effect for me, but it is noticable.

Oh, and I didn't mean it was common knowledge that the Ops menu did that. I was simply corroborating your observations.
I didn't understand it, but I didn't think it would matter. Evidently it does.

EDIT: Oh, hey. My ATI card does disable the effects. Didn't know that. Wonder why it does, and the NVidia one doesn't...

Shwart!!

What happens if you try different strings of equal length to the originals?

TGF would be better suited to try it, as my brother jacked the old video card, so it'll be hard for me to go and test it.
However, I believe the anomaly involves quantity of characters onscreen, so having equal-length strings would do little.

Shwart!!

I'm not sure if this has been said or not but (with my FX 5900XT)...

The slow down affects the main menu, the game menu, the credits menu, the level menu, the advanced level settings menu, and the authentication menu.
It does not affect the Help and options menu, screen options, graphics options, sound options, other options, how-to-play menu and the in-game menus.

There HAS be some common features between these groupings.

Yeah, I'd noticed that too. I just noticed, however, this bit:
There are no more than 4 lines in any of the unaffected menus, and no less than 5 (or the equivalent space has stuff in it) on any other menu, disregarding Back/Quit.

However, if you look at TGFs narfed picture, line 5 is unchanged, yet the problem is gone.

Just something for you all to ponder, while I try to understand what is occuring.
EDIT: On my current, non-buggy card, I tried putting more characters in to see if I could re-create the issue. And guess what? Setting every string to llll... (48 ls), the issue reappears.
Going to make a count of character quantity on most menus.

EDIT 2: Character counts, not counting whitespacing. Note that every menu has 21 additional characters in the title.
Problem menus:
Main Menu: 88
Select Game (SP or MP menu): 80
Maplists not listed, char. count in excess of 100 for each one
Credits not counted (char. count high, not worth counting as it changes too much)
Dom-Eternal Guardians: about 136 (likely lowest gamelobby char count, included for completeness)
Options, same map: about 211 (desc. is on time limit, lowest char count)
Authentication: 80 (with 'accepted' notification)

Non-problem menus:
Update Available: 37
Help and Options: 49
How To Play: 86
Settings: 64
Screen options: 97
Graphics options: 86
Sound options: 97
Other options: 94
Location Menu: 38
Help and Options(ingame): 35

Given that the options menus have small characters, but otherwise the listed characters are almost always the same size, I would be inclined to say that total charsize has a lot to do with the problem.
However, one thing bugs me. 'How To Play' is almost identical to 'Select Game', save with 6 more characters. Yet 'How To Play' does not lag, while 'Select Game' does. Can someone who still has the problem look at these two in more detail?

Shwart!!

Where in the font the letters appear may have some contributing factor, too.

You could try those 2 menu pages as a case study, and work out some sort of metric to assign each menu by giving the character positions a numeric value. I wouln't do this for ALL The menus since it woul take forever, but it'd be nice to see for these 2 as they're in the grey area.

Not quite sure what you mean, but those two are nearly identical. Honestly, the greatest difference is that in 'How To Play' the gametype listings are offset by one line, and there is another line at the top. The words (and included characters) are otherwise pretty much the same.
EDIT: After speaking in IRC with TGF, she explained that she was referring to character location in the font file, and evidently that could cause more or less lag depending on where in the file it was. So I did an alternate test; I took my edited text file (lllll) and made it read only !!!!! (character 2) and ÿÿÿÿÿ (last character), in two seperate tests. They had no noticable difference; first framerate would dip below ten, then the effect would get disabled and FPS would remain constantly at 19-20.
Thus, this line of reasoning is refuted.
EDIT 2: Actually, disregard that refutation, pending further review... (I'm getting some funny results from stuff.)
EDIT 3: Further test results, replacing all menu text with the given character(s), preserving whitespacing:
Standard menu: 32 FPS
!!!!: 27 FPS
ÿÿÿÿ: 27 FPS
AAAA: 27 FPS
XXXX: 27 FPS
{{{{: 27 FPS
QWQW: 27 FPS
QWER: 27 FPS
complete gibberish: 31 FPS

This pattern should not appear, given that the character counts are all exactly the same. However, it seems that repeated charaters give reduced performance.
Not particularly relevant to the topic, but a problem nonetheless.

Shwart!!