I, too, seem to be having this problem since the migration to SDL2. It seems to get worse the more tiles are drawn on screen. The easiest way to see that is to use the zoom function—when zoomed all the way out, each step can take 3-4 seconds.
Curses runs smooth as butter, and profiling with Valgrind seems to confirm that drawing is what causes the game to choke up with tiles. In fact, cataclysm-tiles with tiles turned off is still much slower than similar sized curses window. Tiles chokes up both when I download it from Jenkins, and when I build it myself (with or without the release flag, in 32 and 64).
I’m not sure whether this is something wrong with Cata or with my SDL2 installation and some other thing on my system. I’m running this on a laptop with a built-in Intel graphics chipset, so it’s not exactly the greatest graphics hardware, but it handled pre-SDL2 Cata versions with no complaints. One caveat: I’m running Linux, Ubuntu 13.10. 13.10 doesn’t have libsdl2-ttf in the official repos, and other parts of libsdl2 seem to be older than the latest stable: 2.0.0, while latest is 2.0.2. I guess because of that, tiles don’t work right for me with those libs installed (that’s a screenshot with tiles enabled, and it shows a large, non-refreshing stripe down the middle, and no tiles).
I also found an Ubuntu PPA with snapshots of libsdl2 (so newer, but unstable). With these, I can actually get tiles to show up, but I do get the slowdowns. So, really, I’m inclined to believe the fault is here on my end, except for the fact that others seem to be experiencing the same things on Windows with (presumably) release SDL 2.0.2. I might try to build 2.0.2 myself next, and see if it ends up working any better. I’d also appreciate hearing from anyone else, who’s running experimental builds on Ubuntu.
