Sluggish graphics performance on Surface Pro 3

[TMO]

I see that this thread never advanced past last March. Last year I was using both a Surface Pro 3 and then a Surface Book. My experiences were about the same. I then migrated to a ThinkPad X1 Yoga. In all cases I am running with a Core i7, 16 GB RAM, and 500GB (or larger) SSD drive. Windows 10 64bit always patched up.

Even when I am just running FG locally, which I do often to update my game in preparation for the next session, I experience nearly unbearable lag. Just placing the cursor in front of a word and Shift+Ctrl+RightArrow to select a word can take 3 seconds. Same with right-clicking to bring up the radial-menu. Ironically, this is less noticeable in game sessions because there is so much activity and talking going on.

I have not yet attempted every suggestion to minimize background apps, resolution scaling, external monitors, etc., etc. I will do so, but I would very much like to know if there is a very specific way that I can give FG the highest priority in terms of resources. While my machine is not a gaming machine, it has the highest specs a business machine can have and I do not have lag with actual games (like Diablo or TF2).

I appreciate any ideas.

[darrenan]

Yeah, I gave up running FG on my Surface. Haven't looked at it since I started this thread.

[LordEntrails]

The only specific suggestion I would make is to check your graphics settings and turn off anti-aliasing if it is on.

[Gwydion]

The only specific suggestion I would make is to check your graphics settings and turn off anti-aliasing if it is on.

Just for my info as I'm always trying to learn, what doe turning anti-aliasing off do? Thanks!

[LordEntrails]

Just for my info as I'm always trying to learn, what doe turning anti-aliasing off do? Thanks!

I can't find a good picture demonstrating it at the moment, but if you take a straight black line and draw it at an angle across a white screen. Think about how you have to break that into pixels. Your pixels are then either black or white right? And if your screen resolution (pixel per inch) is low enough, your line looks jagged. Got that?

Anti-aliasing instead "smoothes" that line. Not by adding pixels, but rather by changing the colors of the pixels of the line and the background. It softens the color (black and white becomes 50 Shades of Grey) as you get near to one of this line/pixel breaks so that it looks smooth(er) to your eye.

On high pixel per inch screens, you may not really need it. Such as on a HD phone, you would have to look really close to see a single pixel.

[LordEntrails]

Of course, now I found a good example image;

[Topdecker]

I know it doesn't help, but I can confirm that there are no problems with the Surface 4 (i5, integrated graphics, 8gb memory). The dice have no delay, but obviously do not render every frame. Scrolling maps or text has no lag.

[Nekkroe]

I can confirm that on my Surface 3 the dice roll fine until one window gets opened (say the story tab) then the frames drop to &^%#.

sigh*

[Allmight]

I have the same problem. I run FG on a gaming rig (I5-4690K 3.5GHz, 32 GB RAM, 500 GB Samsung 850-EVO SSD, GeForce 970 GTX, Windows 10 Pro), and everything in FG feels sluggish and choppy. I have tried almost everything, including disabling Antialiasing and Anistrophic Filtering, but no noticable change.

It's still usable, but anoyingly slow.

[TMO]

I have not yet attempted every suggestion to minimize background apps, resolution scaling, external monitors, etc., etc. I will do so, but I would very much like to know if there is a very specific way that I can give FG the highest priority in terms of resources. While my machine is not a gaming machine, it has the highest specs a business machine can have and I do not have lag with actual games (like Diablo or TF2).

Okay, I have finally gone through all of the recommended configurations and nothing helps. Fantasy Grounds definitely needs some specific specs to work optimally but I don't know what those are. In an unrelated thread that Zacchaeus started, I commented how smoothly his new video tutorials were running. He provided me his machine specs but, IIRC, he also noted that due to Fantasy Grounds being single-threaded 32-bit software, beefier specs will not guarantee better performance.

Fair enough. I'm will to invest in a new box just for Fantasy Grounds but I don't want to put money down without some assurance that I am using good specs. Is there a place where minimum or recommended specs are published? I looked but couldn't find anything. Can the developers offer some wisdom here since they know best the underlying technology that runs Fantasy Grounds?