Author Topic: Notes On My FPS Counter  (Read 2632 times)

Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky

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Notes On My FPS Counter
« on: November 03, 2018, 01:48:37 am »
This is to explain why on some of my ObjReader snapshots my FPS counter may sometimes display non-standard readings of 59FPS instead of my usual and prevailing 60FPS.

The matter is that though my current development platform is Windows 7, I still have a lot of useful 32-bit software installed on my old Windows XP hard disk that resides in my main dev workstation. There's much of it that I can't move to Windows 7 WoW64 for various reasons like the lack of installers, license restrictions, etc.

At the same time, my workstation has a triple monitor setup. Since I upgraded my video to nVidia GTX 1060, I now can't boot all the three monitors into my Win XP because there are no XP drivers for this relatively modern video card. The legacy OS simply falls back to some rescue video mode that enables one of my side monitors as the primary monitor without hardware acceleration. The two others (including my true prime monitor) are simply ignored and stay black and inaccessible. Thus, I can't run my old OpenGL and Direct3D XP utilities any more due to the lack of HW acceleration.

To resolve this stalemate, I had to re-plug one of my monitors out of my new video card directly into the on-board Intel video output that provides at least some Intel HW acceleration, lame as it is under Win XP. In this way, I lost one nVidia accelerated side monitor under Win 7 but regained access to my 3D apps under Win XP.

Now the issue is that under Win 7, that Intel-driven side monitor's refresh rate is detected as 59FPS rather than its true native 60FPS. It causes some transient processes in my nVidia card that now has to toggle between the other two monitors' 60 and that "ghost" monitor's 59 frames per second leading to slight fluctuations in ObjReader's sensitive FPS counter readings. The transients are noticeable when I'm catching the snapshots with (Alt+)PrintScreen rather than OR's built-in Save to image menu option.

Under the circumstances, I regard this glitch as my workstation-specific and not related in any way to the quality of ObjReader design solutions. :)
Mike
(3.6GHz Intel Core i5 Quad w/ 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX 1060Ti w/ 6GB VRAM, Windows 7 Ultimate Sp1)