RhapsodyOfFire

Ayreon - Day Sixteen: Loser



Ayreon - Age Of Shadows

was having fun with friends

Rezi wrote: »

Yep, that's what I was thinking of - setting affinity! I tried that a few times on MMOs but doing it through properties is impossible when you go through a launcher, in my experience.

I've set higher priority before, too. But I find that makes relatively no difference, and that in MMOs it's better just to set the QoS to the game server.

Have you tried setting it in the Task Manager?

Btw, as i said setting the affinity only for one process won't prevent the system from doing context switches on that particular CPU core. Because the default affinity of a program is all cores, so it will only make difference if you set all the active processes' (the processes that use CPU often) affinities to different cores so the system can reduce the rate of the context switches drastically. I found an interesting article about the speed of it: http://blog.tsunanet.net/2010/11/how-long-does-it-take-to-make-context.html (the test was done on Linux, but the relevant part is how different the speeds are on different CPU's)

Yes, setting the priority won't make much difference because there aren't many active processes at once. It would only make difference if you had like 8 active processes that use much of every CPU core, so in that case setting the priority would run the process as first on all cores.

Rezi wrote: »

There's also some way to go into properties and force a program to run on a custom core or something...but that's hard to do on MMOs which run multiple programs at once, or go through a launcher. But normally you don't have to do that; Windows is supposed to run its background programs on one core, share what little room is left, and delegate CPU-heavy programs like games to their own cores, which it does even for Vindi. Only really, really, really old programs fail to get switched to alternate cores, and Vindi isn't one of them.

I don't want to pick holes in your words, but this is not the first time someone misunderstands the concept of multiprocessing. : P In an SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) system there are no special cores and the programs usually don't affect which cores should be used. (only if they set the affinity but that's very rare) You see as if it used one core more than the others because the currently running thread on that particular core uses that much more processor power than the other thread on the other core. But context switches are so fast that it goes through all of the idle cores before the hardware monitor program could refresh its informations. The interval unit is called time slice or quantum, it's several milliseconds, and it's calculated from several factors, and it's also different on every kind of CPU. But basically one active process runs on all cores almost simultaneously, even the background processes, the system and the scheduler itself (that does the context switches) chooses the next idle core and executes the context switch on that core if necessary before delegating the thread execution.

However with setting the affinity in the task manager you can tell the scheduler to use specific cores for the process. But if you set more than one cores, it will be switched between those cores. Almost the same as on all cores but you can achieve something like higher priority if you find the active processes and set different affinities for them. Another thing that can be useful, but i heard that it caused problems in Vindi, is if you set a higher priority for the process. But it shouldn't be the problem most of the times especially because there are usually 1 or 2 running threads, the rest are waiting or sleeping or they are just short-living threads. Btw, with the affinity you can eliminate the context switches on that core thus saving some processor power, the only downside of it is that it won't utilize your cores evenly.

Rezi wrote: »

RhapsodyOfFire wrote: »

Every MMO out there with a viable PvP system uses queues so you can't trade your seals/points so easily.

Of which there are only a few, and even with queues players still trade kills because the entire community knows to do so. The only game I haven't seen this in is S4 League and that's because there's no real benefit to raising rank in that game.

Yeah, i wasn't so accurate. In a free-for-all deathmatch you can trade kills (although it's still not so easy), but not if you are put into a random team and if the pvp points/seals aren't distributed based on kills. Maybe if you manage to sabotage your team somehow. This is how it used to work in Tera for example, and even if you queued up with a premade for the 3v3 arena the enemy team was the next one in the queue with an average item level similar to your team's, but you could only guess who they will be.

A similar thing in Vindi is the Royal Army raids.