Originally posted by Unregistered
BTW - My 30 FPS on my iBook is running in thousands of colors. I get about 9 FPS if I try and run in millions. Once again, though, neither Economize or Shimmer settings seem to do anything in millions of colors either.
"Economize" means to skip the z-buffer. This saves VRAM and allows some computers to hardware render when they would otherwise get the software renderer. The software renderer USUALLY gives frame rates in the LOW single digits (to fractional digits), so I'd guess that you are getting the hardware renderer with the 9 fps, so economize won't help you. It primarily helps people with 8 Meg video cards in TiBooks and it should help iMac DV 400s. There may be other marginal conditions where it will help.
Turn shimmer on and watch the tail fins of some fish. See the shadow follow the ripple? Turn shimmer off and watch the tail fins. See that the shadow is stationary? Calculating the lighting effects in "shimmer" takes CPU time. It is a more signficant portion of the total frame time if the aquarium size is relatively small. At full screen it is a small percentage as the video card is the bottleneck. If you lock fps to a value less than the maximum your computer can achieve and turn shimmer off then your CPU utilization will be less than with it on.
I hope this helps.