optimized openal.so = more speed

[Carsten Weinhold]

Hi folks!

Since I wasn't really satisfied with the game speed, I made some tuning 
experiments. Of course I tweaked my graphics settings, but I also 
noticed that reducing the number of audio channnels in UT2003.ini gave 
me some extra frames. Unfortunatly there were some sounds missing, when 
I played CTF-Magma and so I wondered how to get high frame rates with 
many audio channels enabled.

I played a bit with OpenAL, which does the sound for UT2k3. I own a SB 
Live! an I use Alsa 0.9. So first compiled a fresh openal.so from 
latest CVS with Alsa support enabled. I got a quite impressive 
performance boost (15-20%) when playing 32-channel audio, but I also 
had some strange noise and crackling. After some investigation I 
discovered, that ./configuring OpenAL without --enable-arch-asm solved 
this problem.
The result is an openal.so, which was compiled using GCC 3.2.1 for my 
AthlonXP with MMX, SSE, 3dnow optimizations. In detail, I called 
./configure as follows:

export CC=gcc-3.2
export CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -mmmx -msse -m3dnow"
./configure --enable-alsa --enable-paranoid-locks --enable-empty-locks 
--enable-optimizations
(I removed the '-march=i686' line in the configure script, it would 
cause conflicts with '-marh=athlon-xp')

Just enabling Alsa support instead of using Alsa's OSS emulation (as 
with the default openal.so) makes a huge difference. The optimizions do 
the rest. When running a botmatch benchmark on Asbestos, I got the 
following results:

audio config (32 channels)                | FPS | improvement
--------------------------------------------------------------
original openal.so using OSS emulation    | 50  | 0%
optimized openal.so using OSS emulation   | 53  | 6%
optimized openal.so Alsa                  | 58  | 16%
no sound at all                           | 64  | 28%

Benchmarking other cards gives similar results. Since I'm running the 
game with quite a lot of CPU power (AthlonXP 1800+ @ 1533 Mhz), people 
with less powerful CPUs should get even greater speed boosts.


Happy fragging,

Carsten


My System:
----------
AthlonXP 1800+, 512 MB DDR, GeForce3 Ti200, SB Live! Player 5.1
Linux 2.4.19-ac4, NVidia driver 1.0-3123, Alsa 0.9rc3