Folding and gaming

joeyjojo

joeyjojo

joeyjojo

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I usually stop folding when gaming as it hardly gets anything done. It just reaches a load of checkpoints, then quickly completed the frame as soon as I close the game.

To make sure it's not maxing out the cpu I checked how much difference it makes running "graphics intensive" games using maxed out 3dmark (ouch, the fps :( ). It seems to slow folding just as much as "less graphics intensive" games.

So how can you give folding more cpu? Or put another way, stop games maxing out the cpu when they shouldn't?

(That was badly explained)
 
What he's getting at is "How can we stop games hogging our cpu's when they don't need to?"

I have this with a lot of games, they take ALL the cpu power when they clearly don't need it (Uplink, CS 1.6, other non-cpu intensive games).

I'm thinking maybe maybe setting the cpu priority in task manager might help, give it a go?
 
I know, that was badly explained, I'm tired :(

Mr Zefan knows what I mean. Games use 100% cpu when they shouldn't need it all. To complicate things, I've just remembered that AtiTool does the same thing. I read about that a while ago, but...

Could change the priority up to normal but that would make the system unresponsive to say the least. I once put Prime to normal priority by mistake :eek: , system stopped completely as it was so focussed on infinitely looping calculations of prime numbers :o :D

Also, there's a limit to the number of smilies in one post apparently, there were more before
 
joeyjojo said:
Could change the priority up to normal but that would make the system unresponsive to say the least.
Click to expand...

Could you try changing your game's priority? Most are probably set to idle but I have the feeling older games may have it set to normal or even high.
 
Zefan said:
Could you try changing your game's priority? Most are probably set to idle but I have the feeling older games may have it set to normal or even high.
Click to expand...
old ones would use realtime to get 100% of the CPU, but thats real old ones (win 3.11 etc, doom maybe)
 
Perhaps vsync would do something. Usually games try to maximize frames per second, whether they matter or not. This pushes the hardware to its limit so as to deliver the most immersive gaming experience. Why not set it to sync so that it does not work harder than it has to.

/wild speculation
 
As we have learned from the GPU client, we all should know that the CPU polls the graphics card. While it may not need to do this as often as with crunching, it is still something that has to be done. That is why games tend to hog a fair bit of CPU usage - even old games.

SiriusB
 
Results are in. This is playing a skirmish game on Dawn of War, first with the game on normal priority, then on low priority. y axis is cpu usage of fah.





Results taken using performance log feature of XP, graphs courtesy of Excel. I didn't notice any laggyness in the game at all.

Will try with CS:S next, but looks promising :) Is certainly better than shutting the client completely.
 
My understanding is games will pump out as many FPS as they can from the CPU, regardless of whether that many FPS are necessary for satisfactory gameplay. The fix is of course to limit the number of FPS - the VSync method may be one, I'm not sure.

The only other way I can think of doing it is to set Folding and the game to the same priority - this way they will get 50:50 CPU time (they must be equal, not close, since they are both asking for 100%). However this assumes that the game will give satisfactory FPS running with only 50% of the clock cycles. It's probably not a good idea to set them both to normal as that could cause other things to stop responding, so one notch below normal should do it ("BelowNormal"). I haven't tried this method, I only just thought of it it, but don't see why it wouldn't work - only problem is the risk of the game not coping with only 50% cycles.


Hope this helps, null :)
 
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