Low hw framerates

This has probably been asked a bunch of times before but here it goes:

I have a simple app blitting two sprites to a 640x480x16 display. In
windowed mode it runs on a software surface (even though i try to set it
to a hwsurface) but get ~120fps. Running fullscreen, it has a hardware
surface bug gets only 74 fps. Is this normal? All sprites have been
converted with DisplayFormat().

also, is there a more code oriented faq around. the doc project is nice
but it’s only api. We should put a bunch of old answered messageboard
questions in some searchable database.

thanks,
ryan

I have a simple app blitting two sprites to a 640x480x16 display. In
windowed mode it runs on a software surface (even though i try to set it
to a hwsurface) but get ~120fps. Running fullscreen, it has a hardware
surface bug gets only 74 fps. Is this normal? All sprites have been
converted with DisplayFormat().

my guess is that you call SDL_Flip() and this synchs to vertical refresh
in fullscreen mode, and you have a vertical frequency of about 74 Hz.
It’s a feature :slight_smile:

also, is there a more code oriented faq around. the doc project is nice
but it’s only api. We should put a bunch of old answered messageboard
questions in some searchable database.

good idea. sdl is driven 99% by Sam and the rest by volunteers like us,
so if you build a foundation I’m sure others will help you verify and
add to it

I have a simple app blitting two sprites to a 640x480x16 display. In
windowed mode it runs on a software surface (even though i try to set it
to a hwsurface) but get ~120fps. Running fullscreen, it has a hardware
surface bug gets only 74 fps. Is this normal? All sprites have been
converted with DisplayFormat().

my guess is that you call SDL_Flip() and this synchs to vertical refresh
in fullscreen mode, and you have a vertical frequency of about 74 Hz.
It’s a feature :slight_smile:

ups, this answers me a lot of questions! thanks!–
signed
derethor of centolos