Want to increase you're in-game FPS?

[kadaan]

what is the science/reason behind launching windows media player? sorry if this was already covered. there was a grammar lesson i had to sift through.

There was a link in the original post that dealt with this subject.

thanks. i read that but it didnt really explain the "how". but well.. i'll have to reread it and try to understand the process.

I don't think very many people understand the "how", even after reading several articles on it. I just accept the TL;DR version which is "it has to do with windows memory/cpu allocation/reservation, and just opening WMP without playing anything frees up more system memory for WoW to use." I guess that's the slightly-long TL;DR version...

[pewshamanper]

2) Have windows media player open while you are playing Wow.
Now you're properly going to say "hold on a minute, its not Aprils fools day yet..." well this is actually a documented fact that windows media player can help to increase you're FPS by up to double what you're currently getting.
Again this is all hardware dependant and I do not guarantee an FPS increase.

Would this work for a mac with quicktime?

[BobGnarly]

I have to disagree 102% with you on this.
I'm a network engineer that works on windows servers and desktops all day long and have been for the past 6years.
Removing the page file completely I agree can cause some issues with certain applications, but limiting the page file size and stopping it from dynamically increasing DOES help you're system as a whole provided you have enough physical memory to cope.
I have done this on serveral gaming computers and laptops now all of which are running perfectly fine with no errors what so ever.
My work laptop running vista has no page file what so ever and 4GB of ram which I use on a daily basis with no issues, in fact vista is slightly faster in loading applications and games.....

Posting this is bad advice and not backing up you're statement is useless.
If you have a valid reason please reply with a constructive comment and I'll be happy to listen / discuss.

I'll have to disagree with you. Here's why:

First of all, as I said, if you disabling paging and you run out of RAM bad things happen (applications crash or exit). If you run out of RAM with paging on, it probably doesn't run so hot, but it continues to run. I don't really know what "can cause issues with certain applications" means. It will cause problems with every application if you run out of RAM.

Second, disabling paging can actually cause your applications to consume more of your available memory. The reason is that if a program attempts to allocate a lot of memory which it may or may not use, if you have paging off, it has no option but to allocate it ALL out of system RAM. If paging is on, it can safely page the unused portion to disk where it can languish forever, and there is little to no impact on performance since that memory will never be faulted back into system RAM.

Third, even given both of these, I would conditionally agree with you except: my experiences have led me to conclude that any gains noticed on a system that isn't swapping (if your system IS swapping then you're crazy to have paging disabled) are minimal if any. This is where we'll have to agree to disagree, I guess.

So the way I see this, you are taking chances on bad things happening for a gain that I've never personally observed (and yes, I've tried - and yes, I have some experience in this field myself). And while you may never hit the upper end of your RAM, I and many others do. Start editing a few videos and you can easily consume 4G or more. Taking this chance might be OK for somebody who knows what they are biting off and knows what it'll look like when it happens (and how to fix it), but I don't agree that it should be recommended to people who might not have this type of experience.

[Svpernova09]

/Moderator note: I nuked the grammar BS out of this thread and moved it.

/on topic

I don't think opening quick time on a mac would do the same thing as WMP on a PC. I've never tried it, but the idea seems too silly for a mac.

[Nisch]

/Moderator note: I nuked the grammar BS out of this thread and moved it.

/on topic

I don't think opening quick time on a mac would do the same thing as WMP on a PC. I've never tried it, but the idea seems too silly for a mac.

The Media Player trick has to do with thread prioritization.

Here's an excerpt from another article:

“Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMCSS) is a Windows service that boosts the CPU as well as I/O priority of a thread. It allows an application to get prioritized access to CPU for time-sensitive processing (such as multimedia applications) as well as prioritized disc access to ensure that the process is not starved of data to process. The MMCSS service monitors the CPU load and dynamically adjusts priority so that the application can use as much CPU time as possible without denying CPU to lower priority applications.”

And I'm rather sure this applies to Vista only, and not XP. We went through this with AOC when people were trying to get higher FPS from that.

And the paging file disable is not a good idea IMO. I've been a systems administrator for years and have found that this trick causes more harm than good.

If you want better FPS..........get a better computer.

[Kaynin]

Disabling or lowering paging will help but you should monitor memory consumage. As long as you won't use up all your ram, you won't encounter problems.


If you disable your swap file and your ram consumage is 100%, problems will arise, yes. This is why the trick only works on computers with a lot of RAM. (ie. 8Gb+ ram for multiboxing 4-5 characters.). And even then I would advice to monitor ram at all times.

Then, as long as you don't reach the max, you will notice major performance increase..


PS! Important bit, if you run yoru swap file on a fast SSD or sorts, you won't need to do this trick really. Performance increase will be minimal then. But if you have slow HDD's...

[weeep]

what is the science/reason behind launching windows media player? sorry if this was already covered. there was a grammar lesson i had to sift through.

I know for sure that media player DOES affect system performance. My colleague noticed that his custom USB devices are communicating over USB with his software much faster if WMP is running in background. He did some research and found out that WMP greatly increases system timer precision on launch. Probably it leads to much smaller cpu time frames that system is assigning to each thread before contex switch occurs. For example, if thread's task processing takes 1ms on modern CPUs and default system time frame is 10ms, it means that 90% of your CPU time is wasted on waiting for next task. It is just an example, but I hope you get the idea how increasing timer precision may affect your performance.

As for disabling paging file, it usually DOES increase your system performance if you have enough RAM for all apps and file cache. It reduces your stability, because some apps won't be able to save error dumps on crash and some performance counters can randomly stop working, but if you are not intersted in examining crash dumps or performance counters, disabling page file is a good idea. Both my work and home computers are working with page file turned off for last 6 years, and I haven't noticed any errors except those that I've mentioned.
How disabling page file affects system performance. At least in Windows XP (I haven't worked in Vista with PF on, so it maybe better here) all your background apps become moved to page file after some time to free RAM for something else (maybe file cache?). Your slave WoW copies, your browser, etc are considered background if you constantly have your main WoW findow focused, so even if you are actively using them, the system thinks "oh! background apps! I should move them to disk!". And when they start reading data that was moved to disk, you experience lags and slowdowns even if you have enough RAM for all of them.
Personally I was tired of waiting 5-10 sec to switch from WoW to browser window just because Windows thought that browser was inactive and moved its memory contents to disk. I turned pagefile off and task switching became instant.

[Freddie]

3. Configuring a system with lots of RAM to run without pagefile may have either negative or positive perf impact depending on what the system is doing.

Lebedinsky has a lot of interesting things to say about Windows memory management but he says them in comments on other people's blogs so you have to look for them with Google.

Someplace else he points out that even if you disable the page file, Windows will still page (i.e. still do page faulting) because some virtual memory is backed by other files.

The quote is from a comment attached to this blog article about virtual memory by Mark Russinovich (which is very interesting in its own right):

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussino...7/3155406.aspx

[Golle]

For those of you with limited resources (not affecting the post above me) I would recommend a quick glance at this site:
http://kadaitcha.cx/performance.html

[elsegundo]

Thanks to everyone who replied about the MMCSS. its cleared up a few things and i kinda understand the "how" it works now. =]