Compare broadcasters performance?

A friend of mine is on the verge to start boxing and asked me what software to use (a question i often get in wow as well). I summed up the ones i know with a short description, but his final question was more or less: 'whats the impact of a broadcaster on my pc performance?'

He was very interested in isboxer, but since his pc isn't state of the art (but enough to box), he was afraid that - due to it's many features it would slow his pc down a lot. I had no real answer on that, nor could i find much on that. So here i'd like some input: what's the impact of isboxer, keyclone, mojo, hotkeynet, gcp, ... on your system, and if it does uberhaupt influence it.

My browser and my IM program each use twice as much memory as HKN does. If he can run enough WoWs to multibox now, I wouldn't worry about it. With reduction in graphics on slaves, FPS limited on slaves and various other tweaks we all tend to do, he'll probably save far more resources than any of these programs take up.

I can only answer for HotkeyNet and Mojo.

HotkeyNet's impact on performance is microscopic. Mojo's impact is a little bigger.

For most users, WoW is bottlenecked more by the graphics card than by the CPU. HotkeyNet and Mojo have no effect on the video card, so in many cases, that they will have no visible effect on performance.

However it's impossible to predict the result on any particular machine because, for example, a machine might be close to needing to page memory and the addition of any program, even a tiny one, could push it over the line and make it start paging a lot.

The broadcaster apps themselves are almost all about the same impact on PC performance: not worth mentioning.

The only real difference is that ISBoxer can (by default? don't know) "fake" your WoWs into running at full resolution on each client instead of the smaller resolution it would normally scale to when you tile the windows. This causes each of those full-size WoWs to eat up a lot more CPU/GPU than if they were rendering at the smaller, tiled resolution. This has the benefit of making certain scaling features easier to code in ISB and makes PiP swapping faster as the WoW game engine doesn't have to do the work of re-scaling the window itself.

Aside from the rendering tricks ISB does, they're all the same extremely minimal impact on performance.

I can tell you IS will affect performance Vs Keyclone (when I switched), I noticed a not too insignificant reduction in frame rates for the reasons stated above. In fact I upgraded RAM from 6 to 8gb which has made some difference; I suspect if I try keyclone again i'll hit 50 FPS Vs 30 at the moment. I'll try some testing over the weekend with my comp spec as well.

Then again I've discovered AOE + pass next click + IWT + action target groups + baby foot pedals so I get random heals througout the day when she's awake hehe.

IS Boxer is a bit more of a drain on system resources then Keyclone.
I noticed this too, when I switched.

Basically KC renders everything at the displayed resolution.
While ISB renders everything at the resolution of the large window.

For my old system, both were easily playable.
Q6600, 8GB 800mhz ram, 4870 Radeon, 150GB Raptor HD.
AV while mounted or Epic Flight could break follow at times, but not often.

With the new system, it's smooth except for Dalaran.
Have not tried KC with the new system.
i7 920, 12GB 1600mhz ram, GTX275 Video, 64GB Patriot SSD.

alright, that's the info i was looking for, ty

So he installed keyclone and was having insane low dps, almost unplayable. So i went over to his place to check it myself. And found a rather weird thing:

The lag / fps drop was caused by the keyclone maximizer: i.e. starting the 4 slaves tiled on screen 1 and the main maxed on screen 2 from withing keyclone. The work around was to start the main (with full settings) manual from a desktop shortcut and start the slaves with keyclone maximizer.

He went from 15-18 fps on his main to 60 all over the place.

Tought i'd share that.