OK, here's the deal. I'm writing a tetris clone as my first attempt at a Win32/DirectDraw game. So far, it's going pretty good. At this point, I have a single block on the screen that I can move around the screen with the arrow keys. I have a loop that locks the game at 30 FPS and a function that displays the current FPS in the upper left corner of the screen. When I only blit my single 24x24 pix block around the screen (clearing the screen between frames), it runs just fine at 30 fps. However, I also have a large 640x480 bitmap that I am using for the background of the game. This bitmap contains the layout of the game board, the "next" box, etc. When I blit this bitmap at the beginning of my game loop, the framerate slows to 3-5 fps! I have no idea what's going on. Should a full screen 640x480x8bpp blit be this expensive?!? I have a K62-400 and 32Mb TNT2 Ultra. Am I doing something really stupid here? This is really bothering me. You can get the source here. I compile under Visual C++ 6 service pack 3. The specific section of code I'm referring to is located in BlockBlasterEngine.cpp in function CBlockBlasterEngine::Main() Also, you have to use the standart Windows [alt]+F4 to exit the game, as I haven't added a "quite the game" feature yet Any help from you more experienced folks would be greatly appreciated. UberXenon Edited by - UberXenon on 7/10/00 4:50:49 PM

Hi, I have no idea why your game is so slow and I have no time to look at your code either; but I can tell you that I made a small game that uses several big bitmaps (the biggest was 800x600).

I have an PII-233 TNT2 ultra and I got 120fps ( it was flattend by my drivers though).
A friend of my has a PII-300 Voodoo Banshee and got more than 500fps.

So I gues you should be able to get frames like this (for what you are making) or something is very wrong with your code or your drivers.

The Rock
- BAD software -

http://members.spree.com/entertainment/bad_software

ive seen this in this forum so many times , ppl locking the frame rate to a certain value. don''t do it.
heres code to tetris i wrote last week it should run at 200 fps on your machine the reason being it uses opengl instead of directdraw for the 2d stuff. only joking mate directdraw is quicker than opengl for 2d stuff.
http://members.xoom.com/myBollux/home.html

Thanks for all of the input so far. However, I still haven''t solved the problem. As far as what zedzeek said, I have let the main loop "run free"; I removed my StartClock and EndClock. When blitting only the single block, it runs at HUGE fps, but when blitting the background it still runs at only about 4 fps.

I looked in the DXSDK help, and it said that BltFast was only about 10% faster than regular Blt, and that was only for the software implementation. If Blt is accellerated in the HAL (which it almost certainly is), then the speed is the same. So, BltFast isn''t the solution to my problem either.

Any other ideas?

Set your Rect up like this before yout Blt:


Static RECT rectDest;
rectDest.top = 0;
rectDest.left = 0;
rectDest.bottom = 480;
rectDest.right = 640;


The bottom and right numbers are non-inclusive meaning they always have to be +1 from what you really want. Also code for the Esc key to quit. I had to reboot my machine to get out.