Bad performance when using Innerspace?

[Chivalrous]

Hello everyone!

When i am just playing wow, without Isboxer/innerspace i have excellent performance. 100+ FPS, very smooth, even on Ultra settings. When I am using ISboxer/Innerspace, even with just 1 wow.exe running, no DXnothing window or anything, it is never above 20 fps. When i am 5 boxing, it is usually between 5 and 10 fps on all toons. I really don't understand what the issue is.

First, i have read the ISboxer wiki about tweaking my FPS, so you don't need to grab the link and link it for me. :) I have also visited the ISboxer forums and searched for my problem, i found alot of results but nothing quite like what i was looking for. I have been using ISboxer for over 3 months, and have subscribed for a year. I love the software very much, but it has been frustrating me very much lately. :(

My computer specs are

FX-8350 processor 4.4 ghz
32 GB Gskill ram 1600
GTX Nvidia 560ti
990fx mobo

my .config settings for all my toons have AA off, shadows low, ssao disabled, Vsync Disabled, 1920x1080 res. all other settings are Fair except spell particles are ultra. I play with screens stacked and a DXnothing window on my 2nd monitor.



some strange things occur when i am or am not using innerspace--when i am not, it recommends i set my video settings to ultra, when i am using innerspace, it recommends i set it to fair. It also recommends 16xAA without innerspace, and 4xAA with innerspace up. Sometimes, with innerspace up the game is choppy and laggy, and when i mousewheel it will make a Dinging noise. This does not occur when innerspace is not up. I am in windowed fullscreen mode in both instances.

I have reinstalled my video card, using driver sweeper to get rid of all trace of old drivers, and made sure all system drivers are up to date. I have tried with and without SLI (i'm not using SLI right now because it seems to make wow's performance worse)

Any advice or help you guys could give is greatly appreciated, i have done quite a bit of independent research, but alas, i have not been able to find a fix. Thanks very much in advance!

[Ualaa]

Running five copies of the game is going to be more of a strain on your system than running a single copy.

If you have 'instant swap' enabled, in your Layout for IS Boxer, then every window is rendered at full size.
And then is sized down to the display size.
Or if you're using 'Full Screen Stacked', they're not resized... but they're still rendered at the full size.
This allow very accurate mouse broadcasting and instant swap between regions.

Most other boxing software actually renders at the display size.
Meaning, less of a strain on the system.
You can uncheck 'instant swap', to be like other boxing software options.



Not sure how much video ram your card has.
For five boxing, you generally want around 1GB of video ram if you're using DX9 and 1.5GB of video ram if you're using DX11.
DX11 looks better, but DX9 uses fewer system resources.

If video is your bottleneck, you can reduce settings.
AA (4x (or lower) vs 16x (or higher) is more/less of a strain.
Shadows, Water Effects, Sun Shafts, Weather Effects... these are generally more video intensive settings.

The tool GPU-Z can tell how much of a strain your settings are placing on your video card.
You can open Resource Monitor, to check how much of your other resources are being used.
Anything that is close to 100%, is a bottleneck.
Either reduce settings, or upgrade the component.

[Chivalrous]

Thank you for your reply, my video card has 2 GB of memory. To clear things up, the same performance problrlem occurs when running only 1 copy of wow via inner space. 1 copy or 5 copies performance is poor. In fact, 1 and 5 perform the same if launched via inner space.

[Blubber]

Did you try running without DX11?

[MiRai]

Do you have the actual Inner Space window itself showing on your desktop? If so, close it; because that window can eat FPS like nobody's business.

[Chivalrous]

Innerspace is running but the window is closed. When I get home I will try changing dx11 and ill post my config for you guys. Thank you.

[Chivalrous]

I am running 5 screen stacked, what should my fps limiter be set at? Maybe it thinks they're all in background and limiting fps to 30?

[Blubber]

I run 5 windows stacked as well, limited by FPS to 60 foreground and 30 background, works like a charm.

[Chivalrous]

Hey all, i brainstormed all day at work and came up with a list of a few things to try. When i got home i did a new window layout and set it up the same as the last, but changed round robin cpu balancing to select all CPU's with every window and it completely fixed my fps issue. Now my foreground is always at 60 and my slaves are always at 30, when before it was more like 15 and 5 or 10 and 5 >.< no idea why that did it, maybe the new 8 core processors aren't balanced properly for round robin, or my overclocking the processor is throwing it off? anyway, thanks for the help everybody :) problem is solved.

[Lyonheart]

Hey all, i brainstormed all day at work and came up with a list of a few things to try. When i got home i did a new window layout and set it up the same as the last, but changed round robin cpu balancing to select all CPU's with every window and it completely fixed my fps issue. Now my foreground is always at 60 and my slaves are always at 30, when before it was more like 15 and 5 or 10 and 5 >.< no idea why that did it, maybe the new 8 core processors aren't balanced properly for round robin, or my overclocking the processor is throwing it off? anyway, thanks for the help everybody :) problem is solved.

My last PC i used round robin and it was an improvement over using every core for every instance of WoW.. this PC it is opposite Just like you... when i first launched 5 copies of WoW on this PC..it was set to round robin and my FPS was unbearable.. i switched to using all cores for every window and now it runs smooth as silk.. main on ultra and slaves low with high view distance. ( i also stack the screens and use video effects for the slaves )

[Chivalrous]

yeah same thing for me, i guess thats what they mean by mileage may vary :)

[Lax]

Hey all, i brainstormed all day at work and came up with a list of a few things to try. When i got home i did a new window layout and set it up the same as the last, but changed round robin cpu balancing to select all CPU's with every window and it completely fixed my fps issue. Now my foreground is always at 60 and my slaves are always at 30, when before it was more like 15 and 5 or 10 and 5 >.< no idea why that did it, maybe the new 8 core processors aren't balanced properly for round robin, or my overclocking the processor is throwing it off? anyway, thanks for the help everybody :) problem is solved.

I can explain.

You've got a true 8-core CPU (as opposed to an i7 with 4 physical + 4 logical cores), and 5 WoW instances. With Round-robin balancing, this is going to use 1 core per instance on your non-HyperThreaded CPU, meaning you were utilizing 5 of your 8 cores, just over half of the capacity of your CPU. If you Enable HyperThreading in the CPU Strategy wizard (this is by default OFF for your CPU, as it is not a HyperThreaded Intel CPU), it will use 2 cores per instance, using all of your cores.

The basic principle behind using Round-robin balancing over All instances-all cores is to reduce context switches and contention between the applications, assuming your CPU is fully assigned. This is therefore more important when you have more game instances than cores to go around (more typically 5+ game instances over 4 cores as with an i7), whereas in this case you had plenty of extra CPU capacity that was specifically left unused by the default Round-robin options.

So that's the main reason why your new CPU Strategy is such a huge difference over the default. This does give me some ideas for improvements to the CPU Strategy generator, as the default really should better utilize your CPU. :)

[Chivalrous]

Thanks Lax! I'm a huge fan. ISboxer is great and your support is always appreciated. I played all night with the new balancing it is working perfect.

[Lyonheart]

Sheet! So i prob had HT off? i was wondering why i took such a hit on this PC ( i7K btw )doing round robin.. will have to give that a shot..thx Lax!

[Lax]

Sheet! So i prob had HT off? i was wondering why i took such a hit on this PC ( i7K btw )doing round robin.. will have to give that a shot..thx Lax!

Nah, for your i7 ISBoxer auto-detects and enables the HyperThreading option. You probably didn't manually turn it off. My explanation was specifically for OP's 8-core AMD CPU. :)