St. wrote:
> "Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
> news:48aaeb70@news.povray.org...
>> St. wrote:
>>>    Well, maybe not, but it does make a difference.
>> That's weird. I have no idea why it would make that much of a difference. 
>> I didn't think the Windows scheduler sucked that much. :-)
> 
>      Well, I didn't disable that. I left all windows services running and 
> disabled ZA, AVG email scanner, AVG Watchdog, Google update service, 
> Ad-Aware, Epson printer status, A-Squared free service, Office source engine 
> and nVidia driver service(???).
> 


AVG is an absolute bear for system resources. Back at the end of last 
year when I got Portal, I couldn't run it at all. I would get to some 
complex location in the map, and would land on the desktop with a system 
message about not being able to get a texture lock. Quick search of the 
net, most of the people complaining were using AVG. Turns out, AVG had a 
tendency to acquire lots of mutex objects in the OS part of ram, so many 
infact that a moderately well programmed game would have to fault 
because it couldn't get a lock.

Several patches from both sides have fixed the issue, but I wouldn't be 
surprised if it still slowed things down as the OS paged those mutex in 
and out of virtual ram.

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:48ab1740$1@news.povray.org...
> St. wrote:
>>      Well, I didn't disable that.
>
> I meant the process scheduler, not the service called "scheduler". :-)

    Ah, I see.


>
>> I left all windows services running and disabled ZA, AVG email scanner, 
>> AVG Watchdog, Google update service, Ad-Aware, Epson printer status, 
>> A-Squared free service, Office source engine and nVidia driver 
>> service(???).
>
> Oh, OK. Well, I guess the AV type stuff might be running more than you'd 
> expect, and I wouldn't be surprised of the nVidia driver services were the 
> problem.


 You think? I'm surprised that I could play the game at all if the nVidia 
services were turned off. See? Confused.



 I almost always leave that sort of stuff turned off and
> never have a problem.  Lots of AV stuff is a performance suck.

    Yes, this is one thing I knew, but to be fair, AVG is good. If I've had 
a proper virus at all, (that actually infected my computer), then I know it 
was my fault. Everything else in nearly 10 years, AVG has dealt with.




>
>>      I guess you could also disable a lot of Windows services too, but 
>> you'd have to be careful (or at least I would), because some rely on 
>> others to work and I haven't got a clue as to what services rely on 
>> others.
>
> Well, it's all listed, and turning it off tells you what else it'll 
> disable. Knowing what they're *for* is another question. And it won't let 
> you turn off the stuff you need to run windows at all.

   Oh, thanks for that! I was frightened to actually try anything to do with 
Windows services in case I messed something up. I'll have a play... gulp.


>
>> but it felt more 'fluid' if you like.
>
> "Feelings" is what I was trying to avoid, especially when the game will 
> show you the actual measured results. :-)

       Yeah, I know what you're saying. Maybe the removal of 8 gigs hasn't 
actually helped speed up the game, and maybe my map is actually quite 
playable on low end machines. Anyway, I'll know soon because it's not far 
from being finished, and the young 'uns over at crymod will soon tell me. 
Heh...  ;)

     ~Steve~



>
> -- 
> Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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St. wrote:
>  You think? I'm surprised that I could play the game at all if the nVidia 
> services were turned off. See? Confused.

My experience is that most of the video "drivers" stuff is really 
basically compensation for driver flaws more than anything. I've *never* 
run that, and usually never had a game that had a problem. (And starting 
the service before the game never fixed the problem.)   Indeed, I've 
never figured out what it's for. Maybe high-end stuff like color matching.

>     Yes, this is one thing I knew, but to be fair, AVG is good.

Yeah. I use it, but only on an on-demand basis. I usually do a scan 
before a full backup, is all.

>    Oh, thanks for that! I was frightened to actually try anything to do with 
> Windows services in case I messed something up. I'll have a play... gulp.

Well, at worst, stop it, and if it screws soemthing up, reboot.  But 
generally, if you will crash the machine by stopping it, Windows won't 
let you.

> Heh...  ;)

Good luck on that!

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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St. wrote:
> I get around 10 to 18 fps which is 'playable'.

o_O

Anything less than 30 consistently gives me rather bad headaches.  I try 
to keep things running at 50+, though (obviously, 75+ is best, but not 
feasible for me on modern games).

To my eye (and my headaches!), games look better with low resolution and 
low graphics but high framerates.  After all, I'm not sitting and 
looking at individual frames.

...Chambers

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>> I get around 10 to 18 fps which is 'playable'.
> 
> o_O

You've never played Quake II on a Pentium 233 MHz with 16 MB RAM and no 
3D hardware, have you?

> Anything less than 30 consistently gives me rather bad headaches.  I try 
> to keep things running at 50+, though (obviously, 75+ is best, but not 
> feasible for me on modern games).

Uh-huh. And you understand that your monitor only physically draws 60 
frames each second anyway, right?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Uh-huh. And you understand that your monitor only physically draws 60 
> frames each second anyway, right?

Not if you still have a CRT, my old CRT used to go up to 120 Hz and man that 
looked smoooooooth if you could get a game running at 120 Hz (and yes, you 
can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz refresh, IIRC above about 85 
Hz you don't notice any difference).

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> The fact of the matter is, if you were on an island surrounded by highly 
> trained mercinaries and you were armed only with a pistol, you wouldn't 
> last five seconds.

But you're a highly trained military type guy too, and you're taking them 
all by surprise.  Besides, it's not like they have an army anywhere, there's 
rarely more than a dozen of them in one area or more than a couple standing 
next to each other.  And once you've shot one of them, you have the same gun 
they do ;-)

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>> Uh-huh. And you understand that your monitor only physically draws 60 
>> frames each second anyway, right?
> 
> Not if you still have a CRT, my old CRT used to go up to 120 Hz and man 
> that looked smoooooooth if you could get a game running at 120 Hz (and 
> yes, you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz refresh, IIRC 
> above about 85 Hz you don't notice any difference).

Well let me put it this way: *I* can't tell the difference between 50 
Hz, 60 Hz and 75 Hz. They all look the same to me.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> The fact of the matter is, if you were on an island surrounded by 
>> highly trained mercinaries and you were armed only with a pistol, you 
>> wouldn't last five seconds.
> 
> But you're a highly trained military type guy too, and you're taking 
> them all by surprise.  Besides, it's not like they have an army 
> anywhere, there's rarely more than a dozen of them in one area or more 
> than a couple standing next to each other.  And once you've shot one of 
> them, you have the same gun they do ;-)

I double you'd last long against sniper rifles and rocket launchers. ;-)

Actually, I'm waiting for the day when computer games will portray this 
realistically. It's like HL2:DM. 12 guys run around inside a crumbling 
dungeon hurling grenades and using rocket launchers. And after 20 
minutes, the map itself just has a few bullet holes. Obviously, if you 
did this in a *real* crumbling dungeon, there would be walls missing and 
so forth! But no game seems to have managed to do this yet... Presumably 
having a completely deformable map is just too much of a technical 
challenge right now.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
>>> Uh-huh. And you understand that your monitor only physically draws 60 
>>> frames each second anyway, right?
>>
>> Not if you still have a CRT, my old CRT used to go up to 120 Hz and 
>> man that looked smoooooooth if you could get a game running at 120 Hz 
>> (and yes, you can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz refresh, 
>> IIRC above about 85 Hz you don't notice any difference).
> 
> Well let me put it this way: *I* can't tell the difference between 50 
> Hz, 60 Hz and 75 Hz. They all look the same to me.
> 

I always kept my CRTs running at above 60Hz. For some reason, staring at 
60Hz or lower just makes me queezy.

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