downloading whilst playing games

[agnes]

ok, i use Azureus a lot for my torrents, which are legal btw lol, company likes to use torrents as its easier to access from any station around the world.

and ive always got zuse running in the background, but never notice a difference in speed even though it uses a suttle 5%'ish of cpu all the time. i download at 1.2megs, sometimes up to 1.4meg.

i was just wondering if this effects gameplay.

ags

 

[Ewanb75]

I usually find torrents to muck up my ping by a lot, so generally dont bother.

 

[agnes]

I usually find torrents to muck up my ping by a lot, so generally dont bother.

i mean in single player games when on multiplayer i obviously stop them all and close it.

ags

 

[DJammyRasta]

if your pc is powerful enough to take the cpu hit then no it shouldn't prove a problem

 

[Minstadave]

You might want to use a more lightweight torrent client like Utorrent.

 

[z0mbi3]

Use utorrent and manually assign it to one core.

If your game is single threaded then set it to run on the other core.

 

[El_Watcher]

Surely it's not just CPU that torrent uses. Think about the hit to the HDD speed, with it having to read/write for several torrents to multiple clients.

 

[andyp]

I have Utorrent running virtuall constantly when I'm playing (SP) games. It downloads to a seperate partition on a seperate hard drive and I never notice it's there. In fact I finished CoD4 last night and was so wrapped up in it three of my torrents had finished and I'd forgotten it was even running.

 

[HangTime]

I just make sure my FTP or IRC client is minimised while playing, don't really notice it.

Torrents will likely be slightly worse because you are uploading as well as downloading. This means that you may be streaming off multiple locations on your disk, depending on how fragmented the files are. Obviously one would expect a slight increase in CPU overhead too.

If doing large HTTP downloads I wouldn't recommend using IE because once it has finished, it transfers it over from the cache and thrashes the hd really bad.

Quite why your company likes using torrents I'm not sure, I would have thought it makes it harder to access from around the world due to the need to have more/different ports open than a traditional distribution method like FTP.

 

[bloodline76]

I tried whilst playing Crysis and it froze it up

 

[marc2003]

i only have a single core cpu and quite often leave stuff downloading in utorrent when playing games. makes no difference to me.

 

[helmutcheese]

Sometimes they can suck up a lot of RAM and creep up, and also most of your HDD activity will be the torrent.

 

[ssmacc]

i use a newsgroup and have never noticed any slow ups in games (even Crysis), downloading or not downloading doesn't seem to make any difference.

 

[helmutcheese]

Some Torrent clients are known to use a lot of CPU and/or Ram, at times they will run ok and then take 80% or more, depends on seeds/peeps/speed etc.

 

[Admiral Huddy]

You always head into task manager and set the priority of your download to low. This way it will only use "unused" cycles of the processor not being used by the game..

 

[mark43]

I would think this is a fairly easy one. Does it effect my gameplay? I don’t know, does it?

Are your games running badly, and does stopping your download cure the problem? If you can’t see a problem then why worry?

 

[NightSt@lk3r]

torrent programs always made games stutter for me so i moved torrenting to my linux server and now use torrent flux.

 

[PanchoVilla]

What's 'zuse'?

 

[Damien.]

Sometimes Torrents hammer my connection unless i limit them. This is because when they connect to enough seeds they max out my download and upload speeds.

 

[.:MBK:.]

dont bother whilst in MP games, too much of a connection hit most of the time, if in sp then the dls are going to a different drive to PF, windows, and usually, the game, so the hit there is fairly minimal aswell...