Performance Question (Gaming)

[kabooka]

So I play the MMO game CoH/CoV. I run multiple accounts on the same machine (3). The problem I'm having is the PC seems to "pause" the instances that are not in focus, i.e. the ones in the background. I can not figure out why for the life of me. I used to think my PC was good enough to do this, but now I'm questioning. The games loads into RAM and then accesses the HDD to load zones. I know this can be done because there are people that run the game like this all the time. (Even with worse PCs which is just plain embarrassing lol) Here's my build, any ideas without spending $1000s?

AMD Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego 2.4GHz Socket 939 Processor Model ADA4000BNBOX
EVGA 131-K8-NF44-AX 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
SAPPHIRE 100155L Radeon X1800GTO 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 VIVO Video Card
Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive
Patriot Extreme Performance 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model PDC1G3200LLK
Patriot 1GB (2 x 1024MB)184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory Model PEP1G3200LL

I know the ATI / nForce is a bad idea, using ATI's custom driver for it already. <blush>

 

[nukemaster]

Well actually ATI plus COH/COV is bad anyway. When you force dual core mode on the game with the command "-renderthread 1" in the shortcut with an ATI card alt tabbing messes the game up big time(randomly)...

The only time i ran 2 COH's it was one COV and one COH(both logged to coh) so i could transfer from my account to my girl friends...I have not notices any such problem however as far as auto follow while in the other window goes.

Have you tried to run the game in window mode maybe?

I suggest you try with the games in safe mode to see if its any better. COH/COV(more so cov) can eat allot of ram with higher settings(an easy 1-1.3 gigs per instance).

Running 2 copies + Folding @ home...

I think more ram would not hurt, but trying lower settings will also save ram....you can run one with dual core and see the improvement to test....but it may glitch with ATI cards

ATI + Dual Core + -renderthread 1
=

but great frame rates before it happens

 

[kabooka]

Thanks for the reply, for some reason, my PC seems to handle the memory a little different. I added a screen shot of it running 3 instances, granted one is hero side, didn't pay attention while selecting. Hero side seems to be lighter on the graphics though. I was all ready to replace my HDD with a 3.0 sata, but I'm not sure that will bump things up much.

http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p7/kabooka3234/MEMUsage.jpg

Hope this helps

 

[nukemaster]

My bad

I did not see that you had 3 gigs of ram....you have enough ram for the job....but the lack of dual core tends to hurt COH ever since COV came out(ever notice that run great on P4 HT , HT isa fake dual core, but code for it works well on real dual core as well).....crap crap crap....how did i miss that extra ram.....

Your Raptor has far lower seeks(that a good thing) times them most drives on the market, so its keeper....

Your single core cpu and ATI drivers are holding you back at this point....but do note COH/COV is not the best programed game in the world, so every update raises the requirements(not like NC will admit to it)...

I think the pausing is because when you put one game over the other the game in front takes all the cpu power from the game behind it.

Try to bing up the task manager and see if only one COH is taking all the cpu power from the others...

see how the FAHcore's are sharing? check you your COH's share....should be like high 20's to mid 30s for each....screen it...

A little more info on the ATI and multi core CPU's issue

Anandtech did an article on PhysX and COV and found that ATI cards performed far worse, with or without PhysX

Thats struck me as odd since the X1900's should have been as fast(or at least closer) as there 7900 counterparts.

So i did some research and found the -renderthread 1 command and then gave it another X1900XT shot and the performance almost doubled(close to 2x the frame rates, think of almost no lag even in a full wentworths or pocket D). This showed me that the game was optimized for dual core.

Unfortunately this also means that Cryptic decided to no longer have the game well optimized for single core CPUs(Trust me when my girl friend players on her computer[single core A64 3200+] and invasion is the biggest lagfest ever wentworths is experience in lag control).

To add insult to this, due to a bug in the game or ATI's drivers(or both) running dual core code with an ATI card results in the above image of graphics corruption i mentioned. It get like that and stays that way, makes it hard to attack.

Cryptic and NC know this and have the dual core code not auto run with ATI cards(it also does not seen to auto run on core2 systems....so i always put it into the shortcut now...)...

 

[kabooka]

Thanks a ton, I'm going to try that switch and see what happens. This all puts me at about $400+ upgrade since I dont want to buy slower equipment. These prices are newegg except for the ebay one

AMD FX-60 is going for about 300 on ebay plus stupid shipping prices. (no idea why so high)
Nvidia 8600GT is about 100

or

Q6600 at 260 + motherboard at 60-80
4 gb ram 100
nvidia card 100

LOL, think I'll go for the Intel/nvidia stuff if that switch doesnt work

 

[nukemaster]

unfortunately the switch will not work with a single core athlon64. But as mentioned ATI cards do not get along with the dual core optimization....

Is one COH taking all the power from the others when its put in the foreground?

The Core2 architecture is very efficient. so a core2 at 2.2 will be even faster then your current system even in single core apps

There is a VGA chart on toms to give you an idea of how fast video cards are in a given set of games. its worth a look....with COH Nvidia seems to have the edge, while ATI cards are as fast and even faster in some cases not being able to use the dual core optimized(this is the only game i have ever seen that does this....Open-GL games also tend to favor Nvidia cards at the moment too) game makes Nvidia the only option until someone fixes that...

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html

Here is a CPU chart. You would be surprised how fast cpu's have evolved....I since the 4000+ changed to a 2.6 but with less cache....it should be close....

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=940&model2=880&chart=435

If it comes down to building a new computer, come on back and i am sure people here will help you with part decisions....