Hey guys,

I have made a little 3d game with away3d and it was working perfectly until the latest flash 18 updates.. after the 3d models load, the fps drops from 60 to 0-3 fps. I have tried to find a solution without success. I noticed that now, in the Away3D stats panel the “drive” indication changed. it used to be “directx” but now it shows drive:software.
Am I missing something here? Is there any additional plugin I need to play my game now? I am using the latest Mozilla Firefox.
Any help and opinion would be greatly appreciated.

I just decided to try out a Away3D game I wrote a couple years ago and it ran just fine in FireFox (Updated July 7th from the looks of it). I checked the flash version and it is 18.0.0.209 which was updated on July 14th.

So for me it all looks good on my end with the latest software. Not sure what could be going on.

Does this game lag for you:
http://www.gamefizz.com/driving/crazy-highway-driver-3d/

Hey thanks for answering. The game you linked me, plays perfectly.
I too believe there is nothing wrong with the latest updates.
In my game I have the away3D stats and I noticed that it doesn’t indicate drive:Direct anymore. The new indication is drive:software. I believe this to be the reason for my problem but I don’t know how to solve it..
I am uploading an image to show what I am trying to describe.

That does sound strange. If you haven’t changed your code or anything I don’t see why it would suddenly default to software mode. This doesn’t sound like an Away3D issue, it sounds more like a Stage3D issue.

You might want to take a look at this:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/display3D/Context3D.html#driverInfo

If hardware rendering fails this driverInfo string is supposed to give you a little more info as to why… Maybe that’s a place to start.

yes it is very strange indeed. I didn’t change the code. The game was playing on solid 60 fps previously. 
Additional symptoms I encounter are:
- this happened on multiple PCs after the latest flash updates. Without any change in my game code.
- One clue that might help is that I always encountered the same problem when I was trying to play the game on Google chrome browser.

The link you posted might prove useful, so thanks I will try it. I think that something might happened with the flash hardware acceleration.

Guys,
I found a solution to the problem. It is my stupidity. The hardware acceleration in my flash was disabled. This is the solution 8)

Glad you found the problem. I was going to ask what what type of lag it was? Graphic, Stutter, Control, Ping, etc.

I assumed graphic since you said it was originally working at 60fps, so I was curious what it dropped to. You can use a FRAPS utility to measure your framerate.

Just incase anyone else runs into graphics lag problems, this is my experience with it.

In my knowledge all you can do to counteract graphic lag is optimize the game graphics settings and optimize Windows for higher FPS. Or reducing graphic resolution (not always optimal). 

Also turning off antialiasing and ambient occlusion settings.

Of course, there is always an option for better graphics cards, but that is the expensive route to solving the problem.

Glad you seem to have fiyed your problem though. Let us know if you run into anymore problems.

Hey Dereck,
The lag was fps. The framerate was droping to 3 fps and and the memory usage was peaking. But the reason was the hardware acceleration in flash settings was de-activated. Simple as that.
I use the awayStats to measure fps rage and memory.

There are many ways to counteract graphic lag like:
- Set swf video quality to low.
- lower anti-aliasing
- optimize your code for polygon rendering.
- Using the camera3D.lens.far to avoid rendering polygons you don’t need.
- And of course, you can lower the polygon count of your 3D models.