Suddently i realised what the real reason for poor performance on ATI cards was, for some particle effects i used textures with dimensions which weren't "NPOT" (power of two), and apparently most of ATI cards of DX8 and even DX9 era don't really like this at all, it looks as if they implemented NPOT support so they could say they have it and that was all for them, in reality while npot supports works on their hardware, it's performance is somewhere between "TERRIBLE" and "IMPOSSIBLY SLOW", and by that i mean when comparing performance to NPOT support on Intel GMA 950, and that's a low performance netbook graphics chipset!! The GMA beats most DX8 class radeons in npot texture rendering speed.

So, for now i reworked all textures to power-of-two dimensions, which wasn't difficult, but it would be nice if they got their npot implementation right, i mean as in "do it properly or don't do it at all" kind of way.

With all this work on supporting older and weak graphics hardware properly i also added automatic degrading of graphics quality settings when underperforming hardware is detected, it simply calculates the number of frames drawn in 5 seconds and see if average is unacceptibly low, then it turns off sprite shadows, which are the biggest performance problem.

I also decided to actually name the game engine used for Top Down City. So far it didn't really have a name but now it's called the "Mayhem Engine".

I think it describes it very well.

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