Frame rate and Windows background program questions???????????

[Oddball]

I just up graded my computer and started flying again.  I have noticed that with a new cpu/os/extra RAM/video card that my frame rate has not increased ( around 77 frames in tower to less the single digits in major furball).

Let me give you the stats. on the computer:
CPU: 1.2 (from 750)
OS: Win XP (from Win98SE)
Ram: 1.12 Gb SDRAM PC133 (from 512Mb PC133)
Video: ATi Radon 9600 Pro 128 MB DDR (from ATi All in One Radon 64MB)
Motherboard: A-Bit KT7A-RAID (from ASUS K7V)
SoundCard:Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live
Internet connection: Earthlink DSL (connection rate 10 Mbps, with 70 or less in ping rate while playing Aces High)

I have tried the tips in the HTC tweaking menu,  I have adjusted the viewing size of the window as well as the color 16 to 32 and back.  I have tried the unlimited framerate as well as the 60/40 framerate settings.  The 64,000 dollar question: Is there any thing else that I can tweak that will increase my frame rate????

I would like to be able to track my target without having to second guess where the plane as gone after a slow framerate hickup.  

On the Operating System: What are the background programs that I can turn-off that Windows XP runs that will not effect my computers' running, but unload the cpu for better speed?????

I have installed the latest 4in1 Via 4.47v chipset drives for the computer along with the latest drives from ATi for the video card.

If I arrange the two hard drives on to one 80 pin flat cable and the two disc drives on to another flat cable; will this increase the cpu speed any??? The current arrangement is one disc drive slaved to one hard drive on the same 80 pin flate cable.  

With the motherboard supporting a RAID system can I put the hard drives on to the RAID IDE connector without having affected the computer or speed?????  Will this unload the cpu at all or increase the time it takes for the cpu to access the hard drives?????

Thanks Skuzzy for your post on the Windows XP hints and tips for shutting down the back ground programs that it's running.  It was going to be a hit or miss situation on which program to shut down for me ( being unfamiliar with Win XP ) I was not sure what programs I would be adversely effecting. Skuzzy your post says that about 16 applications should be running in the background for Windows XP.  It seems that I have just about 40 programs running in the start-up for Win. XP.  How do I reduce them to the minimum programs to run for Windows and which ones??????

I known that there are better/faster cpu's out on the market right now, but with the system that I have installed in this computer, it should be screaming with speed and great frame rate.  Where have I gone wrong (Wait don't answer that)   .  I just need to increase the frame rate so the game can be that much more.

[gunahurl]

Try going to Black Viper's site @ http://www.blkviper.com/ to see how, and what services you can disable safely in Widows XP. maybe that will will help. Lots of good info there about XP.


Gunahurl  

[Tabasco]

I don't know if this would affect frame rate, but I would advise keeping your hard drives and removeable disk drives on separate IDE cables.  Putting the two HD's on one 80-pin flat cable, and into 'IDE 1' on the mobo, could increase performance and will save you some headaches down the road.  This could help frame rates if you currently have AH residing on the HD using an older (40-pin?) cable, slowing down the drive's performance.

[Oddball]

Thanks Gunahurl, went to the web site that you listed and found several programs that I can shut down that will unload the cpu.  I never knew that Windows XP was such a cpu HOG.  After finding out this bit of intell. I am thinking about changing back to Win 98SE  since I haven't changed the file setting ( swapping from Fat32 to NTSF). I am toying with the idea just to see if there is any difference in the frame rate/speed of the cpu.

Tabasco; You know anything about RAID motherboards?????????
Thanks for the tip on changing the IDE/Hard Drives/ Disc Drives/Flate cable around.  The motherboard user manual had a side note on this setting that you mentioned, but I blew by that statement in a rush to get the computer up and running.  As for the RAID settings on the motherboard I plugged in an old hard drive of mine to the RAID side of the board and during start up it was pick up but I never say it when I was in Win XP.

[Saintaw]

Hmmm I ran AH/ WinXp on a P600 with a Gforce 2 in 1024/768 and was sometimes, but seldom in one digits FPS. (heavy smoke, or a lot of bombers taking off in a mishun).

Do you have all the latest drivers for your video/sound card? I noticed a big difference between the 43.35 & 44.3 Nvidia Drivers, the later one is much better. Sound drivers make a difference too. (I'm on a cr*ppy Sblive!(tm) ... hate it  )

Raid on the mobo will probably hinder your CPU (you're not going to use a lot of disk activity with Aces High...it's what 34 Megabytes, it will fit in your memory once loaded. You're going to be using a percentage of your CPU memory for the RAID instead.) Am no expert by no means, but it makes sense to me

[Dingbat]

Originally posted by Tabasco
I don't know if this would affect frame rate, but I would advise keeping your hard drives and removeable disk drives on separate IDE cables.  Putting the two HD's on one 80-pin flat cable, and into 'IDE 1' on the mobo, could increase performance and will save you some headaches down the road.  This could help frame rates if you currently have AH residing on the HD using an older (40-pin?) cable, slowing down the drive's performance.

IDE put the drives on thier own dedicated channel.  Only one IDE device on one channel can talk at a time, you put both drives on IDE-0 you'll lose performance...

.  Here's what I'd do,

IDE-0 Boot Drive (where OS is loaded)
IDE-1 Second Hard drive

Place your page file on the second drive.

Raid depends on how you have it set up.
Striped is better for speed, but had no fault tolerance, so you lose one drive you lose it all.

You will suffer very little overhead using raid, believe me I've using a striped array on my 733 and a single IDE drive in my other 2.4GHZ machine and disk performace was almost the SAME.

AH is a processing HOG! if anything you should have gotten a new Motherboard that supports a faster memory type, DDR or RIMMS.  Imho VIA boards sux ass, IIRC they had serious performance issues issues with there AGP bus.

Also you could install the drivers for your raid in XP, then connect your drives there and probably get a boost too.  In that case RTFM on how to set it up.

SBLive is a fine card, just AH has issues with it and some other submarine game, hmm Creatives fault or HTC...  When there are hundreds of games that do just fine with it...

Do you have anitaliasing off, how about antroscopic filtering?

TWEAK XP...

[Tabasco]

I wasn't talking about a RAID setup - don't have experience in that area.

[Dingbat]

I started in about the two drives on one channel, then progressed, sorry I wasn't trying to imply that you were wrong about raid.  It was directed to  Saintaw

[SlapShot]

I have an ATI Radeon 9500. If you have you VSync locked to the refresh rate, you won't get much higher than that. It sounds like your monitor refresh rate is running at 75Mhz ?

My ATI Direct3D settings are:

SMOOTHVISION II

Anti-Aliasing = 4X

Anisotropic Filtering = 8X

Texture Preference = High Quality

Mipmap Detail Level = High Quality

Wait for Vertical Sync = Always Off

TRUFORM = Application Preference

I also have a SONY Trinitron Multiscan G500 21" set at 100Hz refesh rate.

[Oddball]

First I would like to thank everyone for responding to my post in helping fix the O' WinXp OS.  If it weren't for you guys I would be lost for sometime to come.  Probably crash my computer several times over.

Again Gunahurl thanks for the web site to read over about tweaking the system.

Tabasco I have changed over the IDE cables and the system is running alittle smoother over all.

Saintaw: I have the latest drivers for the chipset/motherboard/video card.  I am in the hunt for a possible driver for the monitor, if they have one.  Now for SoundBlaster Live, well the jury is still out on that card. I have had problems with the card in Win98, not so with WinXP. Got the RAID side of the motherboard up and running and the responce with the harddrives on that IDE connection is faster, I think. Maybe it was just changing around the IDE setup i.e.... hard drive/ disc drive combo.

Dingbat: I changed the flate IDE cable from the old 40 pin set up to the new 80 pin cable.  I took the hard drives and moved them to the RAID side of the motherboard.  With this setup I have in IDE-1 the two disc drives; IDE-2 has a 100meg ZIP drive; IDE-3 has the two hard drives.  The hardware is woking fine now I am tweaking WinXP.

Slapshot: The monitor is set at 60Mhz right now I can go as high as 75Mhz and that's it.  I would like to change that setting, but the program will not allow me to change to a higher setting other than 75Mhz; why, I have no idea.  I have a flat LCD screen that works great so why do I need a refresh rate.  This damn computer thinks I have a CRT monitor and I need a refresh rate. I thought that LCD monitors didn't need one??????

To all; here is a web site that was suggested to me by a co-worker.  I have read into the site and found it very informative.

                                   http://www.TweakTown.com  

Oddball out.  

[Ghosth]

Oddball

Did you get drivers with that flat screen monitor?

Sounds like that may be part of your problem anyway.

Does it list it correctly in desktop, properties, settings, advanced, monitor?


Sounds like you have a handle on the rest of the stuff.

Perhaps you might consider a dual boot win98/winxp.  

As to the fat32 vs ntfs It is my understanding that while the ntfs system gets you more space, its not really any faster than modern ide with good ide drives.

As long as your still on fat32 you should have the option to do a dual boot.

[Skuzzy]

The DirectX API provides a programmer a way to handle sound.  The application has no direct control over the sound card.

The SBLive cards do not report any hardware buffers to DirectX being available.  When you run full hardware acceleration, this basically indicates to DirectX, not to do any buffering of sound data and pass it all to the sound card driver.  As there are no sound buffers available for the data, the Creative driver takes to managing the sound buffers in software.  Unfortunately, thier drivers use quite a few CPU cycles to manage this.
When you set the sound card to 3/4 acceleration, it cause DirectX to help handle buffering of sound data.  This removes the buffering done in Creative's driver and allows DirectX to handle it better.

The overall effect is to reduce the load the sound card has on a system.  The SBLive cards are decent cards, but have rather poor drivers and very little hardware management, which take up too much CPU overhead.  On slower systems, or systems that are at the limit of the CPU, the most common manifestation of this will be video stuttering, as the CPU cannot get the data to the video card as it is too busy being interrupted by the sound card driver.
Setting the sound card acceleration will reduce the CPU overhead for the sound card and does allow for more cycles to be available for the video card.
This improves video performance, just slightly, but more importantly, it gives some CPU back to the application.

Any proper flight simulator will always be a CPU hog, as it were.  The amount of calculations required, for this type of software, is enormous as compared to non-flight sim applications.
In the flight simulator genre, anything you can do to free up CPU cycles will usually help with the graphic performance.
Cranking SBLive cards down to 3/4 acceleration will free up CPU cycles.  It may not be apparent in other applications, but these spare cycles will be apparent in a proper flight simulator.

[Hap]

i'd say spend the $200 to $250 & get a 2. something cpu; i didn't & fr is fine.

[oblitt]

I have found that my frame rate is directly limited by my refresh rate....set at 60mhz=60fps(max); 85mhz=85fps(max)

[Dingbat]

Originally posted by Oddball
Dingbat: I changed the flate IDE cable from the old 40 pin set up to the new 80 pin cable. I took the hard drives and moved them to the RAID side of the motherboard. With this setup I have in IDE-1 the two disc drives; IDE-2 has a 100meg ZIP drive; IDE-3 has the two hard drives. The hardware is woking fine now I am tweaking WinXP.  

Shoot, put the second Hard dribe on IDE 4