PiP swapping speed, and optimization

[Eloxy]

Ahh right. clears up some things ty



Eloxy

[keyclone]

so in short, (if i understand this correctly) we have to make sure no wow window actually overlap another.

not overlap each other... just don't go over the boundaries of the display itself... bleeding into the next display. thereby either requiring the data to be moved between the internal display buffers.. or from one graphics board to another

[GirMoose]

One thing for you to try:

You said you dont like hiding the taskbar, but I have found (in 32b vista anyways) the windows taskbar to be one of the biggest effects on graphics related lag ever.

If you open a normal wow window for instance, make it windowed mode and not full screen, so you can drag it around and put it whereever you want on screen and check your fps (in my case) I was getting around 100-140fps in a 1440-900 resolution. If I then moved the window so the tiniest amount of the edge of the wow window overlapped under the bubble of the start bubble, the fps would drop to about 25. I tested this on 2 machines.

Therefor, it might be possible, that by making the very bottom edges of your wow windows like 5 or so pixels above the very top edge of the vista start bubble with maximiser would improve either your pip swap speed, or your fps.

I havent actually tested this with maximiser running, as im not at home to try now, so the effect may not happen when the borders of the wow window are removed.

Anyways, hopefully it helps someones performance, and if not, no big loss

GiR

[Zub]

Thanks for that GiR.
I've tested it with my Winxp though and on my single maximized wow i get 60fps no matter where it is placed (on top the taskbar, or not)

could be a vista-only thing

[zanthor]

he also ran a simple test.. his (very high end) system was running his wow @ 2560x1600 (i think) on one screen and was getting 130 fps. if he slide the window so it spanned the two displays, the fps dropped to 90 fps (still good, but that was a ~25% drop).

I'm curious, was this on Vista or XP? I have seen this exact behavior on XP if you aren't using span on a single card (No experience with span on dual cards) however I have not seen this on Vista with a single card.

[Oswyn]

anyhow... here's the thought. if you have 2 graphics boards (like i have now...) and you have 1 monitor per board (i was looking to max out gpu performance)... then a pip swap would be moving the surfaces from the memory of one graphics board, across the system bus, and into the other graphics card memory. the slow down here would be the bus speed, system memory, and also the mainboard (grrrr)

Wonder how AMD/ATI platform would do with increased HyperTransport Bus speed (3.0) and integrated memory controller.

[HPAVC]

One thing for you to try:

You said you dont like hiding the taskbar, but I have found (in 32b vista anyways) the windows taskbar to be one of the biggest effects on graphics related lag ever.

Windows (versions / mileage varies) has issues with desktop icons as well, especially excessive amounts. In addition to the crazy send_to and new_templates. If you can disable desktop icons, hide toolbar on start of wowloader or whatnot that would be smart imo.