Why does SRB2 hate my laptop so much?

So, I played with this anoying list of thing I will mention next in this post for long, but this starts to be more than just anoying...
SO, I have a good laptop that runs Sonic Generations, TF2 on high settings and other cool games but... it can't run srb2 decently...

First off, I use 1280 x 720 resolution, which strangely fill up my 1366x720 screen, I made the draw distance lower to try improving in game performances but it doesn't change anything, my problems are...

FPS drops for no reasons, it doesn't go less than 20 / 35, it happens even in the first room in THZ2, basically everywhere in ERZ2, plus, Black Hole is unplayable for me.

Control Freeze, yes, really a funny one, you know, jumping across a pit while doing a ring attack emblem and suddently, the game makes you keep turning right/left (depening what you were doing) and locks the rest of the control, this is outrageous.

Sound Loop, this is just wasting the awesome musics of SRB2, yes, I love them, even the repetitive GFZ1, it happens for both musics and sound effects, when it happens, the controls generally freezes, as mentionned before.

Here are my specs, I am sure this is way enough to run this game...

OS: Windows 7, Family Edition premium, 64 Bits.
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) II P360 Dual-Core processor (2,30Ghz)
GPU: AMD Readon HD 6650 series (1024 MB)
RAM: 4 GB

Tell me, is my PC "2bad4playingsrb2?" :(

EDIT: Noticed that the game uses only one Core of my processor, even after changing, this doesn't improve performances and it uses one Core again after relauching the game

"Lat'" said:

FPS drops for no reasons, it doesn't go less than 20 / 35, it happens even in the first room in THZ2, basically everywhere in ERZ2, plus, Black Hole is unplayable for me.

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It's weird, right? My laptop is a total bitchlord, yet it can run SRB2 almost perfectly(there are some performance problems in the starting areas of DSZ1 and CEZ2, but that's about it). Meanwhile, my other PC, which is much less of a bitchlord, has the same problems you do.

"Lat'" said:

Control Freeze, yes, really a funny one, you know, jumping across a pit while doing a ring attack emblem and suddently, the game makes you keep turning right/left (depening what you were doing) and locks the rest of the control, this is outrageous.

Sound Loop, this is just wasting the awesome musics of SRB2, yes, I love them, even the repetitive GFZ1, it happens for both musics and sound effects, when it happens, the controls generally freezes, as mentionned before.

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Oh yeah. I remember these. Basically, I just closed Hamachi, Skype and all that other background crap and it stopped. You should try that, maybe it'll fix your performance troubles too.

So, my laptop is... a... bitch?
Anyways, launching SRB2 alone doesn't fix the problems for me... At least it fixes it for 1 hour but after it starts to happen. I could turn down the resolution but play with ugly black broders... I hate this.

The solution is simple: You have a good computer! Congratulations! Get a Windows XP instead-oh, wait, Microsoft started unsupporting those.

Seriously, though, old very shitty computers are great for old not-so-shitty games like Super Mario 64, Mario Party 3, Sonic Robo Blast 2, etcetera, while modern computers may or may not be as good. Sonic Robo Blast 2 Community Build Motion Blur on a very shitty Windows XP? Smoothest thing ever. Sonic Robo Blast 2 Community Build Motion Blur on this quite good gaming Windows 7 computer? Less than 5 frames per second back when I tried.

Try the SDL2 build. It's specifically designed to fix SRB2 not running well on newer hardware, along with a couple of other things. There's testing for it going on right now.

Sonic100000 said:

Try the SDL2 build. It's specifically designed to fix SRB2 not running well on newer hardware, along with a couple of other things. There's testing for it going on right now.

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As I said in the SDL2 thread, it doesn't fix any of my problems, and softblit makes the game even worse... OpenGL has the same problem than software in both build... I really hate my computer right now...

SRB2, and especially software mode, doesn't scale up to high resolutions well. Try playing at 640x400 and you'll probably have a vastly better framerate. SRB2's graphical assets don't scale well into high resolutions anyways. Also, the game has never supported using multiple cores because multi-core CPUs weren't exactly a thing in 1993. It's not bugged; it just doesn't know what multi-core computers even are. It's a twenty year old engine after all.

On the other hand, I've never had the controls lock outside of alt-tabbing issues and the sound has worked fine on every computer I've ever tried to run the game on.

So, I tried what you told me to do, it works but the game is ugly, and the black borders make things worse X). Tough it makes all the problems disapears.

Then I tried something stupid, I wanted to know what sarcasm could happen with max resolution, fog, MD2s, shadows etc in OGL, and you'll launch, it doesn't go below 27 FPS, and not below 30 without MD2. The sound/control freeze problems seems to happens more often in software with high resolutions, but very RARELY happens in OGL in my case, it happened one time in 40 minutes of gameplay, and this was just a sound loop.

Please, describe this logic, for god's sake...

Software mode, as the name implies, is a purely software rendering engine. It displays the game with ONLY your processor (and only one core if it's multi-core). The faster your processor, the better software mode will run. My old computer was actually capable of running software at 1280x800 with zero framerate drop because it was a moderately powerful single-core machine. This is also the same processor being used for the rest of your computer's functions, so if you're also running a billion other programs, your performance will take a direct hit.

OpenGL mode is a hardware mode, which means that instead of using your processor to render the game, it's using your graphics card. The better your graphics card, the better OGL will run. Because graphics cards are hardware dedicated entirely to the purpose of rendering graphics, they're generally better at it than your processor, and will often be able to handle the game at significantly higher resolutions than software.

If you can run OGL at a higher resolution than you can run software, all that means is that your graphics card is more effective than a single core of your processor. This should be true for basically any modern machine.

Mystic said:

Software mode, as the name implies, is a purely software rendering engine. It displays the game with ONLY your processor (and only one core if it's multi-core). The faster your processor, the better software mode will run. My old computer was actually capable of running software at 1280x800 with zero framerate drop because it was a moderately powerful single-core machine. This is also the same processor being used for the rest of your computer's functions, so if you're also running a billion other programs, your performance will take a direct hit.

OpenGL mode is a hardware mode, which means that instead of using your processor to render the game, it's using your graphics card. The better your graphics card, the better OGL will run. Because graphics cards are hardware dedicated entirely to the purpose of rendering graphics, they're generally better at it than your processor, and will often be able to handle the game at significantly higher resolutions than software.

If you can run OGL at a higher resolution than you can run software, all that means is that your graphics card is more effective than a single core of your processor. This should be true for basically any modern machine.

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That's why I regret my old WinXP box... Still have it but it belongs to my sister now so... Anyways, as the problem is basically solved, we can close this, I think.