Is a pure textbased HUD possible?

haloterm · Post by **haloterm** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 9:05 pm

Today I noticed a great frame rate increase when I disable the HUD (no mods using) by pressing the H key (from 14 to 20 FPS near stations, from 18 to 30 in empty space).

However, being without information on fuel, velocity, altitude, shields, missiles etc. is not easy in all situations. So is it possible to create a pure textbased HUD which might save my precious FPS, but still display the needed information?

I am aware of hudtext.dat, but I think this is not sufficient.

Post by **Vice** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 10:30 pm

Not pure text currently. On a system like yours, you might find a small performance improvement by importing much smaller textures for the various displays and HUD, or maybe even blank ones that are just 8X8 in size or something. Might not help much, but it would give you the more text-only look and reduce the memory overhead a bit.

haloterm · Post by **haloterm** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 7:50 pm

Hm, I'm not sure if this is always only a memory question. I suppose that the HUD textures are kept in memory, nevertheless if the HUD is currently visible or not. So the actual drawing of the HUD components takes so much FPS.

I will nevertheless try to replace some textures with emtpy ones. Thank you

Post by **Vice** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 7:59 pm

Not just memory, that is correct. It's only one of several factors. You may not notice much of an improvement. Integrated video systems use system RAM as video memory and sometimes it seems lowering the video memory overhead with integrated systems may improve performance slightly. Much of the performance needs for the game when the HUD is on comes from rendering addition 3D details along with the numerous tracking/targeting, navigation, and 'avionics' systems that activate when the HUD and cockpit displays are on (hence the reason a powerful 3D card plus a powerful CPU with fast memory really helps the game perform better).