Single machine 10-boxing survey/speculation

[Sajuuk]

Seriously sam, learn to read the OP.

I should try playing SERIOUS SAM. Heh.

Does anyone know of a program that will tell you what files are being open when in a log fashion and how much data is being read into system the video ram and when and by what processes. I am sure that there is I might look into this tonight and get to the bottem of all this for sure.

That'd be spiffy.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I been playing with this a bit:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb896645

With a single client; There are tons of reads from .mpq files in the data folder but they are very small (some as small as 32 bytes). Only large 2M plus files when you zone. Rest are typically like 16K. But there are a lot of them. But no where near 5M Byte a Sec from what I can see. So its not really throughput its drive latency that is most important as the game wants tiny little bits from a number of .mpq files and not one big sequential read. Which makes sense; it want one boot texture from what 1000 plus possible different boot textures?

Also data from the server is very very minimal.

Does seem that latency of the storage system is a lot more important then the raw maximum read speed.

I also have this:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/dd535533

Seems that one client will take up 1.5G of virtual ram on my 4G ram system.

Well its going to take a lot more study. Hopefully some others will check out these issues so we can have more information. Would be nice if we had a program that told us when data is found in ram but seeing the number of times the system goes to disk (which perfmon will tell us) is also very usefull.

Still the faster the game can access the .mqp files in the data folder the less texture lag there will be, but you can lag from weak gpu.

As pointed out above though texture lag will stall you then you will go back up to normal; whereas gpu lag will keep your fps always low, as would cpu lag if it occurs. I don't think there is such a thing as ping lag as that just makes your gpu render guys in the wrong spot (character "overrun" their location then snap back with the server sends updated positional data)



There must be textures for "far away tiny" characters and "close larger" textures. It does not make sense to load in maximal character textures when all you need is 10percent of the pixils because the character is far away. Otherwise you couldn't hardly fly over anywhere.



Sry I missed the fact that the poster I was responding to was the same as the op ....



This needing of a lot of tiny bits of data is kinda why I can play well with my outdated (but fast cpu speed of 3.2ghz) system. Its not total throughput thats important like I once thought (something which the X58 systems excell at). Clearly even the junkest system can support throughputs under 5MByte a second.

It should be trival to see if the gpu is insufficient; just lower the effects, if you still get lag at the lowest settings then the gpu needs replacement.