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OK, I know there can be huge differences between video cards. But this is an interesting situation. I'm using FPSC but this has nothing to do with FPSC (at least I don't think so).

I have three levels so far for this game. The levels starts out with 38 fps on the first two levels using two different computers. The third level starts out with is 38 fps on the development computer and the it starts out with 24-25 fps on the test computer. I on purpose am using a lesser video card on the test computer but I can't understand why the first two levels are the same as far as the fps goes on both machines but not on the 3rd level.

There is a big difference in both ram and on-board video memory and maybe that's where the difference is.

Development computer has 4 GB of RAM 2.4 GB free and clear for running the game and the video card has 512 MB

The test machine has 941 MB free and clear for running the game and the video card has 256 MB.

Would appreciate if anybody has any thoughts so I can tell people what they might need to have the game play at a decent speed (fps).

Actually, though, this particular level doesn't really require a continued fps of between 32 and 38 fps to play a decent game. It does vary, however between 18 (not very often at all and only when conversing with a character) and 35.

I think it's pretty obvious - the third level is more performance intensive. If you uncapped the framerate, you would notice a difference on the first two levels as well. The framerate you get in one level is not even a remote indication of the framerate for another - the number of polygons, lights, entities, etc. that make up each level affect the overall performance. This applies to any game engine.

People think vRAM (video RAM) and normal RAM do a lot more than they actually do. One of the most important things about a video card is how fast the core is, not how much RAM it has. RAM is important to an extent, but I would wager your game maybe uses 200-300 MB of system RAM and around 200MB on the vRAM. What is slowing you down is that the GPU and CPU are slower.

There could of course be other factors, such as a fragmented hard drive or one of the computers could have way more junk running on it than it actually needs.

Thanks guys.

RAM does make a difference when using FPSC and testing the game from within FPSC. It uses a lot of RAM and eventually gets sluggish and slow (not actually the frame rate -- just the program itself plus whatever else I am doing.)

Both computers have a clean and compacted registry and the hard drive is not fragmented. I still don't understand, though, how a compiled game can run equally for two levels but unequally on a third level. However, what I am seeing by these two posts it is most likely the video card core, regardless of my inability to understand the issues going on.

So, if everything is working to my expectations on my development computer (it doesn't have a top of the line video card either), then I would probably need to suggest to whomever is having a decrease in the fps rate that they should probably upgrade their video card.

You've already been given one possible answer:

Can you provide the names/models of the video cards you are testing on?