Do you have this issue with AO: 100% CPU use ?

[Chrisax]

Do you have the same phenomenon?

- Playing AO on Win XP in window mode (so it's easier to ALT-TAB and use another software, use browser, etc.)

- Nothing big running in the background

- With AO window minimized (invisible except a button in the task bar), CPU use is around 13%

- When AO window is on the top (game visible), CPU jumps to 100% and stays like that until I minimize again. And so on.

- So, if I bring another application to the top but AO window is still visible, this application is extremely slow (for example Items Assistant, but also even the save box in Notepad). And when I minimize AO, it takes a few second for the situation to become relatively normal again.

To see CPU activity:
- Press CTRL ALT DEL once to open Windows task manager
- Click on the "Performance" tab to see the graphs
(The method can slightly differ, depending on your version of Windows)

[Ceokittymeow]

Are you kidding Chris? When I play AO in full screen on a AMD Athlon 64 X2 4300+ (its a duel core) and even after patching the CPU, I still get wicked high numbers on CPU usage

As for heat though thats another story all together... Ao is the only freak game i play and i have played many to test this, that makes my computer run at 50+C with one instance running (AMD has high heat issues)

[Grind42]

I will test.. I never usually use windows mode. I just Alt Tab it works great lol.

[cutiecub]

It's normal Chris, i have a comp with an "old" cpu and when OA runs even in 800x600 and graphic set to min it eats all cpu, half of other applic even refuses to even start then.

[Rulzern]

Completely normal, and an artifact of the CPU-bottleneck that limits AOs performance on new computers.

[Chrisax]

Ok, the really odd thing is it was not that bad like one year ago; other applications were not crawling that bad... strange.

[noobas]

seems like something to do with the graphics, like, it's not the actual game, but the graphics.

As I recall ao graphics are processed on the motherboard, NOT on the graphics card, hence why the devs are so adamant to upgrade the graphics systems.

if the graphics are run on the motherboard, this is exactly symptomatic of whatt you would see: low usage ized, when no graphics are being processed, huge usuage during open, when the main CPU is running all the graphics info.

It was games like this that made software engi's realize why people need dedicated graphics cards

[Chrisax]

Oh wait One year ago I played on a 1280x1024, now i used a 1680x1050 (so 1680x1050 on the CPU and RAM)... THAT is why it's worse!

OK... I really need vacations, really... or sleep...



:chrisdidit:



(And, yes, AO was designed at the time of DirectX 7 and almost doesn't use the Graphic card. I explained that in several posts about the new engine.)

[Hyde]

I played AO at 1920x1080 windowed mode for the last couple of years, on a quad core CPU. Had no issues. Yes, it would eat up 1 core pretty solidly but the other 3 were just fine. In fact I could triple log and alt-tab between them quite easily (quad logging started taxing things a bit since 1 core wasn't able to dedicate to Windows).

I never played in XP-compat mode.

What is your CPU? If it is multi-core, try not playing in XP-mode. If it is not multi-core ... well ... fix that

PS. I'll try to work on bots tomorrow night. It really should just be untarring the files and trying to run them. I have a business trip this week so if not tomorrow it won't be til the end of the week unless someone else can step in.

[Ceokittymeow]

What is your CPU? If it is multi-core, try not playing in XP-mode. If it is not multi-core ... well ... fix that

If it was only that easy eh Hyde?

[Hyde]

What is your CPU? If it is multi-core, try not playing in XP-mode. If it is not multi-core ... well ... fix that

If it was only that easy eh Hyde?

Can you even buy a single-core desktop these days? Seriously even most notebooks are dual core. Single core is either a netbook or SO 2005. Hell the rigs I played on from 1997-2007 were all dual CPU (not core but similar) for the very same reason that I always let 1 CPU/core dedicate to Windows. Life is SO FREAKIN INSANELY BETTER like that. And nowadays you don't really pay extra for it, either. Not like the dual or quad CPU motherboard days.