Isboxer causes fps drop

Going to explain this the best way I know how..

Keyclone does not cause my fps to drop at all. I'm pushing 60+ on the main frame and 30-40 on my 2 slaves.

Now when I start them up with isboxer I drop to 8 fps and can not function.
The only difference (I'm guessing) is screen resolutions. Keyclone runs my main on like 720x something. And Isboxer is running my full screen resolution of 1920x1080 on the main and 1600x900 on the second monitor.

Note: I could be totally wrong here I'm just guessing at what it might be.

I've even loaded without any other addons but Isboxer and I can get 12fps on good settings. While with keyclone I can get the 60+ on ultra.


I have a new computer that is less than a month old. Here are my settings.

OPERATING SYSTEM:Windows 2.6.1.7601 (Service Pack 1)CPU TYPE:AMD FX(tm)-6200 Six-Core ProcessorCPU SPEED:3.81 GHzSYSTEM MEMORY:7.96 GBVIDEO CARD MODEL:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 TiVIDEO CARD MEMORY:3.95 GBVIDEO CARD DRIVER:nvd3dum.dllPRIMARY DISPLAY RESOLUTION:1920x1080SECONDARY DISPLAY RESOLUTION:1600x900HARD DISK SIZE:465.66 GBHARD DISK FREE SPACE:392.96 GB (84%)DOWNLOAD SPEED:820.83 kB/s (6.7 mbps)

1) disable all addons, does this still happen? under certain circumstances one of the jamba modules was causing viciously low fps

2) in game set all three boxes to the absolute minimum graphical effects.


What is your fps after you do these two things?


You might have the best luck if you run isboxer with three identically sized windows one on top of the other, and then on your second monitor run video feeds to the two slave accounts.

Opening all 3 without any assistance I run 60 fps on all windows ( + on ultra). On low settings I'm getting 90-100fps on all windows. Run Isboxer only and I get 5fps. Run all addons with keyclone and I can get 60 fps.

Now I just went over isboxers wiki page about fps and made some changes. No instant swap, and set my cores to all run together. And my fps increased to 20fps on each instance.

To throw a wrench into it all. If I turn on repeater fps jumps to 50-60. Turn it off and it slams back to 20. Weird I know. I just might uninstall and reinstall isboxer. Maybe something isn't working well together.

Hmm I think you might be running into trouble about the windows being different sizes... the fact that you're seeing weird repeater behavior seems to point to that. What happens if you just create an empty window layout and open your team using that?

There's a page on the ISBoxer wiki regarding performance: HOWTO: Tweak your framerate, just so that we that support ISBoxer don't have to continually repeat ourselves ;)

The HOWTO starts out... "First of all, let us be clear: your framerate (FPS) with Inner Space and ISBoxer should not usually be significantly lower than your framerate without Inner Space and ISBoxer with the same size, number, and position of game windows. This guide should help you achieve at least the same FPS, if not higher."

Start there! :)

What I do when I have windows different sizes (which normally happen when starting a fresh team in ISBoxer with existing characters) I have window sizes that are 1620+ and this causes low EVERYTHING! So what I do is go into each window and change them all to the same low window size that is set for non widescreen (since I like to have 4 down the side of my screen with the main window in the left) however if you are using widescreen, then set it to the lowest widescreen resolution that you are confortable with.

Now remember you may need to scale the rest of your addons and UI to suit your visual preference.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lax

There's a page on the ISBoxer wiki regarding performance: HOWTO: Tweak your framerate, just so that we that support ISBoxer don't have to continually repeat ourselves ;)

The HOWTO starts out... "First of all, let us be clear: your framerate (FPS) with Inner Space and ISBoxer should not usually be significantly lower than your framerate without Inner Space and ISBoxer with the same size, number, and position of game windows. This guide should help you achieve at least the same FPS, if not higher."

Start there! :)

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Already did that if you read my post above yours =) . And upped my fps by about 10. And yes I went step by step and changed all that I needed too/ could.

I will see if changing the resolution to a lower screen setting helps. Anything might work ya never know..

And yes I do not understand the repeater issue. I'll also try a blank install for the windows.

When I changed the orientation of my monitors I had the same issue. I just deleted the window layouts in IsBoxer and used the wizard to redo them, fixed the problem. Might need to delete your whole team and use the wizard to redo the cpu profile.

The wizard hasn't let me down yet.

If you play the game, with three screens all at maximum resolution...
There isn't going to be much difference between IS Boxer and loading the instances manually.

If you're comparing IS Boxer, to boxing with say Keyclone or another product.
Most of those render the slave windows at the smaller resolution.
That results in one large rendering and two smaller rendering, or greatly reduced system requirements.
IS Boxer renders every window as the large window (unless you disable it), and then scales the slave windows down.

A question would be... do you need Ultra on the slave windows?
Could you get by, with higher settings (however you want them) on the active/current window and lower settings on the other windows.
You can easily set up a mapped key, to apply Settings: High to the Current window and Settings: Low to the other windows, whenever one window is made to be the main window.
Reduced settings on some windows might slightly reduce your swap speed (but it will still be quick), but it will greatly increase performance when playing.

Quote:

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To throw a wrench into it all. If I turn on repeater fps jumps to 50-60. Turn it off and it slams back to 20. Weird I know

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If your FPS jumps up to decent FPS simply by enabling broadcasting mode, something is abnormal and I assume some trivial setting might solve a problem.

If you haven't tried changing your CPU Strategy, for example, try setting it to "Select all CPUs with every window". If you are using the default round-robin balancing on your 6-core CPU with 3 instances, you're only half-utilizing your CPU. Noting that your CPU is AMD and therefore probably doesn't have HyperThreading enabled by default, you can also purposefully enable HyperThreading and use the default round-robin, which will put 2 CPUs to each instance instead of one (to use all 6).

You have the game in one of the DirectX modes, right? Not OpenGL? You can try changing it to use the opposite DirectX setting as well, between 9 and 11... ISBoxer should still technically work in OpenGL mode but I cant say I've tested it with WoW (but City of Heroes/Villains before they shut it down, and Minecraft... is there a Minecraft mod for auto-follow?)

I'm not sure how much of this is still necessary but my "low graphics" macro is this


/console groundEffectDist 1
/console horizonfarclip 2000
/console farclip 1000
/console skycloudlod 1
/console projectedTextures 0
/console waterDetail 0
/console rippleDetail 1
/console reflectionMode 0
/console particleDensity 80
/console weatherDensity 0

And when I tell one box to "high graphics" it sends the low graphics key bind to all of the other windows.


/p high graphics
/console groundEffectDensity 15
/console groundEffectDist 1
/console horizonfarclip 2112
/console farclip 1250
/console skycloudlod 1
/console smallcull 1
/console skycloudlod 1
/console projectedTextures 1
/console waterDetail 2
/console rippleDetail 2
/console reflectionMode 3
/console particleDensity 150
/console weatherDensity 1

Yes I have it set to directx9 as that is what wow is using via ingame settings. I am not using round robin as suggested by the wiki page.

And no I do not liking comparing one software to the next. But it was the easiest way to explain my problem. One program (even though it works only sometimes) works without an fps issue. Where the other is just Killin my fps.

Yes I have turned down my settings to even fair. And the fps issue is not solved. There seems to be some sort of funny thing going on with isboxer and my system. I was hoping someone has ran into this little bugger of an issue and would know what causes it.

It is not a video card/ hardware issue. Its with isboxer not doing something right. Repeater on fps 30+ repeater off 5-12 fps.
I've created several 'new' teams and changed the windows layout, the setup, turned off instant swap (which didn't didn't off) etc and the only results were about a +10 fps increase from 12 to 20. On Fair settings.

But thanks for racking your brains guys. I apperciate all the help. I'll stick with keyclone for now. Maybe something will trigger the 'light bulb' and the magic fix will be there.

Not sure if this is still valid or if Lax fixed that already but I think you need to minimize InnerSpace to tray or it can cause serve fps drops.