Maximizing FPS with Maximizer? Issues with very low FPS

[Fixxa]

I've been a VERY happy user of keyclone (5 accounts on 1 PC) for some time, but have been frustrated with low FPS when using Maximizer. I thought it was a hardware issue, but I've since upgraded and have experienced no increase in FPS when using Keyclone.

By way of background, my PC is VERY high-end. I run Vista-64, 8GB of DDR2 800 RAM, quad core proc ocd to 3.2g, and 2x GeForce 9800 GX2s. When running WoW alone, I can push 200+ FPS without breaking a sweat.

The problem starts when using Keyclone, and maximizer. Even when I run only one account through Keyclone/maximizer, I get less than 10 FPS. Running 5 accounts, I get 10 FPS on each account. The only way to improve the FPS is to fiddle with the video settings so the maximizer is overridden, then I get high FPS. Of course, I can't do this on all 5 accounts (running 2 monitors, with 4 accounts in a grid on a 2nd monitor). All 5 accounts are running at 1680x1050 resolution with the "1-to-1" setting selected on maximizer.

Is there anything that I might be missing? Any advice on increasing my FPS?

Thanks for any help.

[Anemo]

Are you using Dual View or Horizontal span for the dual monitors? From what I've read around here there are some major FPS issues when using Dual View that should improve by switching over to Horizontal Span.

I was under the impression this was fixed in Vista and odd that it would happen with just 1 window but might be worth checking.

Have you played around with the maxfps and maxfpsbk options much?

[Elias]

I have almost same problem , i run 1+4 on 2 monitors and with maximizer the fps is reduced by around 50% , i end up playing at 10 fps at AV , which is close to impossible...

I have adjusted the maxfps and maxfpsbk and i cant find an option to change to horizontal span , so i use Dual View , can someone tell me where can i put the horizontal span option (graphics is HD 4850 (ATI catalyst control center)

Also , is there any way that i can uncheck the maximizer enable option , only on 1 display monitor ? when i exit the window mode from wow , keyclone stops working for a reason i am not aware of , please assist , otherwise i think i am going to get another pc , which will be more expensive that i can afford .

[Fixxa]

Are you using Dual View or Horizontal span for the dual monitors? From what I've read around here there are some major FPS issues when using Dual View that should improve by switching over to Horizontal Span.

I was under the impression this was fixed in Vista and odd that it would happen with just 1 window but might be worth checking.

Have you played around with the maxfps and maxfpsbk options much?

The NVIDIA control panel for my cards doesn't have an option for Dual View vs. Horizontal Span. I'm only given the option to use Quad SLI (which limits me to 1 montor) or not. Windows display properties are just as unhelpful. Perhaps the distinction was eliminated in Vista?

I've played with maxfps and maxfpsbk quite a bit. Doesn't affect anything sadly. WTB "min"fps :)

[keyclone]

i have a quad core running vista64 w/ 8g of memory on a 750i SLi FTW with 2x 260s driving 1 monitor each ... and when i put a 2x2 grid on one monitor in 1280x1024 mode... i can barely get 15 fps on each. but when i put all 5 on one card/monitor running 1920x1200 with a 4 stack on the right.. i get 50 fps on every wow.

i asked a friend at a tech hardware company.. and i was told the problem was most likely the motherboard... as the 750s are throttled in the hopes that people will jump to the 790s. (grrrr)

he did mention there might be a new graphics driver coming out soon (might be out now)... and that it might help (i'm currently running v177.41)

if you find out any info, please let me know

[khardee]

i have a quad core running vista64 w/ 8g of memory on a 750i SLi FTW with 2x 260s driving 1 monitor each ... and when i put a 2x2 grid on one monitor in 1280x1024 mode... i can barely get 15 fps on each. but when i put all 5 on one card/monitor running 1920x1200 with a 4 stack on the right.. i get 50 fps on every wow.

i asked a friend at a tech hardware company.. and i was told the problem was most likely the motherboard... as the 750s are throttled in the hopes that people will jump to the 790s. (grrrr)

he did mention there might be a new graphics driver coming out soon (might be out now)... and that it might help (i'm currently running v177.41)

if you find out any info, please let me knowI myself am running a 790i SLI with 2 9800GX2's that I got yesterday, and for the life of me I cannot
better than 15 FPS when trying ot run 2 monitors. Like the previous poster, my drivers do not have
the dual view vs horizontal span option. It's SLI or Multi-Monitor. So I would say that your friend that
says the 790 would be better is mistaken. With my previous 4 box setup with a single monitor split
4 ways, the system screams. When I enable the second monitor, there is an immediate significant drop
in performance.

I've gone to running a 1 large 4 small on a single 1920x1200 monitor using the config file from the keyclone
site, but I am seeing PIP swap times in the neighborhood of 2 seconds, with noticeable re-rendering going on.
I'm sure I must have something set wrong if you are seeing sub second swaps. Are you using the config that
is posted for 1920x1200 on the keyclone site? If not, could you post your max config file, or perhaps give a
hint or two at setting that I may look to first?

[zanthor]

I've gone to running a 1 large 4 small on a single 1920x1200 monitor using the config file from the keyclone
site, but I am seeing PIP swap times in the neighborhood of 2 seconds, with noticeable re-rendering going on.
I'm sure I must have something set wrong if you are seeing sub second swaps. Are you using the config that
is posted for 1920x1200 on the keyclone site? If not, could you post your max config file, or perhaps give a
hint or two at setting that I may look to first? The absolute best performance I ever got from KeyClone's PIP was in the 1.5-2second range. The swaps would worsen noticeably in heavy combat with spell effects, etc. Saddly I think this is just a limitation of the platform.

As for the dual view issue, Vista doesn't have it, becuase Vista doesn't need it. The horizontal span options were available through the drivers to fix the fact that XP didn't use video acceleration on secondary monitors at all. The drivers would lie to XP saying it had a single monitor of that resolution and handle the rest internally.

If you are using two video cards and swapping the client from one to the other, you will be utilizing the system bus to transfer data between them, I believe this is why there is a performance hit. This is not a problem with one card & two monitors, but I've been told this is the cause and experienced this situation when I tried dual video cards in my vista box.

[khardee]

If you are using two video cards and swapping the client from one to the other, you will be utilizing the system bus to transfer data between them, I believe this is why there is a performance hit. This is not a problem with one card & two monitors, but I've been told this is the cause and experienced this situation when I tried dual video cards in my vista box.This is definitely not the situation that I am encountering as I am currently running 2 monitors off of a single card even though I have two.
Actually, for some reason, I can not get a monitor to come up on the second card. I am currently running with both monitor on one card. My preferred setup would be 3 monitors, 2 on one card for WoW and 1 for web surfing etc. on the other. I have an SLI system because I like to
switch the SLI on with maxed out setting for end game raid content. Even running 2 monitors off of one card, my performance goes right
in the tank when I put even a single wow on each monitor. I guess I'll have to decide between doing some more tweaking and testing or
leveling my 4 boomkins to catch up to my DK.

[magwo]

Some info about swap times

Actually, it is possible to achieve excellent swap times - by using OpenGL rendering (--opengl).
However, frameless windows don't seem to work with opengl, and I noticed poor performance during heavy spell effects in OpenGL mode.


The reason Direct3D (default rendering mode) takes so long to resize/swap, is that the device has to be recreated from scratch, which means reloading all textures etc etc etc.
OpenGL handles this differently, so resizing a rendering surface in OpenGL is a minor operation that goes quickly.

Sadly though, it doesn't work at all with maximizer parameters at startup it seems.

[zanthor]

I'd be curious to hear about the performance on these systems using Innerspace, as I had significant performance issues swapping (everything else was fine) until I switched to IS using Windowsnapper.... now ~5ms swaps are the standard.

[cgistar]

Horizontal Span is a Windows XP only mode. In vista if you run multiple monitors off of a single card you can clone or have unique desktops (dual view). Multiple cards don't have the clone option as far as I am aware.

I am also using a multiple monitor setup with a very similarly beefy system as listed in the original post. The only real difference is that I'm using a dual core cpu instead of quad core. Running WoW of any size/scale on two monitors instantly reduces the frame rate by 50%. Move both windows back to one screen and the frame rate shoots up. This has nothing to do with your hardware. What I've been able to determine is that this is due to how Vista and D3D work along with the new graphics subsystem. NVidia can't support Horizontal span with Vista apparently due to changes in the graphics subsystems. What may be happening is that all frames are rendered on your primary displays graphics card, and then being output to the secondary screens. The only solution I've found is to run every instance on the main monitor, which is less than ideal.

As for the comments about the 750 being throttled to get people to buy the 790, the reasons to buy the 790 are the difference in components. The things that would effect your base performance given similar cpu and ram are front side bus speed etc. Those are going to be identical. While the 750's may have cheaper parts, I've never seen them work poorly compared to a 790 when using the same copmonents. DDR3 vs DDR2 can have benefits, but for most people they won't notice a difference. More importantly it's not the source of frame rate problem being reported. I have a much beefier system than a friend that is also dual boxing. He gets the exact same reduction in frame rate when using two monitors, we can reproduce them in the same way, and we can remove the effects by moving everything to the main monitor. Honestly, if I didn't have other reasons for using Vista 64, I'd go back to XP 64 for the horizontal span option in the drivers which appears to be the only way to get single card multi monitor 3d acceleration working properly.

Edit: I wanted to note that the frame rate reduction I get has nothing to do with maximizer either. Simply starting to instances of wow in windowed mode manually, and then dragging one to the second monitor results in the drop in frame rate. This points back to Vista/Graphics drivers also.

[zanthor]

Edit: I wanted to note that the frame rate reduction I get has nothing to do with maximizer either. Simply starting to instances of wow in windowed mode manually, and then dragging one to the second monitor results in the drop in frame rate. This points back to Vista/Graphics drivers also. Here's a question for you... are you running dual video cards or just dual display? I'm running vista 64 with an 8800gt and get 40fps out of my main window (maxfps40) with a single instance or 5 copies running...

if you are running dual cards, then if you start wow pointed at the m ain display and move it to the other one, it goes into software rendering, and yes, you'll suffer framerate hits.

If you are running a single card with dual displays and seeing this, something isn't right, because Vista FIXED the graphics subsystem.

[cgistar]

Here's a question for you... are you running dual video cards or just dual display? I'm running vista 64 with an 8800gt and get 40fps out of my main window (maxfps40) with a single instance or 5 copies running...

if you are running dual cards, then if you start wow pointed at the m ain display and move it to the other one, it goes into software rendering, and yes, you'll suffer framerate hits.

If you are running a single card with dual displays and seeing this, something isn't right, because Vista FIXED the graphics subsystem.I can reproduce this on multiple computers. One video card and two displays - instant frame rate hit. Two video cards and two displays - instant frame rate hit. Vista changes the graphics sub systems a lot, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were fixed. If you read around on the nvidia forums there's lots of complaints about multi monitor 3d acceleration in all kinds of applications including scientific simulation, CAD, and others. NVidia point at Microsoft and changes to the API's available to them as the source of the problem.

As far as drivers go, I'm using the latest drivers released by Nvidia, which came out a few days ago (the 19th). 180.48. This same issue occurred with the previous versions of the driver, though the frame rate hit isn't quite as bad with 3 or 4 instances of wow as it was previously. If this was just my box showing this drastic frame rate reduction I would chalk it up to an error on my end. Since I can drive over to my buddies house, and watch the exact same behavior occur given that our hardware is not similar I am less inclined to believe that.

Also, if there is a way to overcome this I would generally love to know as right now it's driving me crazy and has been for a few weeks.

[cgistar]

The 180 driver series is supposed to have SLI multi monitor built in, so I'm going to try that now.

[cgistar]

I am getting respectable frame rates with SLI turned on and two displays running from the SLI configured cards. I've gone from maybe 15fps max in the main window to 55fps.

[zanthor]

I can reproduce this on multiple computers. One video card and two displays - instant frame rate hit. Two video cards and two displays - instant frame rate hit. Vista changes the graphics sub systems a lot, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were fixed. If you read around on the nvidia forums there's lots of complaints about multi monitor 3d acceleration in all kinds of applications including scientific simulation, CAD, and others. NVidia point at Microsoft and changes to the API's available to them as the source of the problem.

As far as drivers go, I'm using the latest drivers released by Nvidia, which came out a few days ago (the 19th). 180.48. This same issue occurred with the previous versions of the driver, though the frame rate hit isn't quite as bad with 3 or 4 instances of wow as it was previously. If this was just my box showing this drastic frame rate reduction I would chalk it up to an error on my end. Since I can drive over to my buddies house, and watch the exact same behavior occur given that our hardware is not similar I am less inclined to believe that.

Also, if there is a way to overcome this I would generally love to know as right now it's driving me crazy and has been for a few weeks. I have a bit of experience with Windows, Multiple Displays, and Microsoft's support of dual monitors as far back as windows 98, as that's when I put my first dual-display system together.

Pre-Vista windows support of dual monitors was great for 2d apps and sucked for 3d apps. This was fixed by and large by driver options from the video card manufacturers that fixed the issue by lying to windows and saying it was a single big display. The downside, dialogs often pop mid-display which has a big fat bezel in the way... a very minor inconvienance for what it's worth.

Vista completely revamped the graphics sub system, beyond that I don't know what they did.

I do know that on my Athlon64 X2 5600 and X2 6000 systems I had nearly identical performance in XP using span as I did in Vista using the dual displays. This was consistant no matter which monitor I drug windows onto, no matter if I used maximizer.exe, Keyclones maximizer, or just ran wow in windowed mode.

Using Vista I found myself in the position of having an 8800gt, a 7900gt, a 7600gt and an 8500gt all at the same time, so I figured why the hell not, lets put two cards into my box and see if that works out... it didn't, as soon as I drug wow off onto the 2nd video cards display it went to shit. Playable, but no where near the performance I got with a single card driving both displays. I quickly wrote this off thinking that it was a new version of the old issue, later (if I'm interpreting this right) I found out that its quite a logical limitation based on DirectX.

DirectX chooses a primary card to render an instance with, if you drag the window to another display, it still uses that card to render the data with, then passes it to the other card to display. I believe this can be negated by telling directx which display to load the game on... I could be misinformed though.

So my question to those having performance issues with single card systems: What model card do you have? The 9800gx2 as discussed earlier is really two 9800's soldered together... anyone else using similar cards having the same issues?