Win2k and general game performance question

[ScreaminGecko 0]

I recently read about the Win2k Game Launcher update over at VE. I was curious, when using it and setting the game's priority to high or real-time, assuming the same hardware, does the game now play faster than on a 9x machine, or still slower, or does it depend on the game? Just curious if I should start using my Win2k installation to play games instead of on the 98 partition. Thanks!

[DosFreak 2]

Never set an application to Real Time. Real Time is for I/O devices. Keyboard/Mouse/Drivers etc....

[clutch 1]

Thank you DosFreak. I thought I was losing my mind when I would see people recommending this kind of thing. People tend to think that if they are running one application (i.e. a game), then they can devote all available resources to it. However, there are numerous services and applications constantly running that require CPU time. Real time effectively tunes them out by funneling the vast majority of clock cycles to the app that is launched with this switch. While some people have been able to do this sort of thing and have it work, it is something that really shouldn't be done. Want more performance? Get more RAM or a faster CPU. Or look at overclocking. At least with overclocking you stand a far greater chance of staying within spec of your equipment.

 

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Regards,

 

clutch

[ThC 129 0]

yeah running games at real time is BAD. Even games at high priority is BAD if you want to run a game run it above normal and thats about as high or else your system will quit on you. As for will they be faster than on 9x, well it depends on hardware and stuff generally a well tweaked NT 5 or NT 5.1 (whistler) box will run games faster than 9x will anyway and if it doesnt the difference is usually negligable for the stability and security you get from NT.

[JDawn 0]

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by ThC 129:
As for will they be faster than on 9x, well it depends on hardware and stuff generally a well tweaked NT 5 or NT 5.1 (whistler) box will run games faster than 9x will anyway and if it doesnt the difference is usually negligable for the stability and security you get from NT. </font>

Am i doing somthing wrong then? because all d3d games run significantly slower on win2k then they do on win98. in Giants its the difference between 18/31 fps, and 25/50+fps
while Ogl games do run fine.

system is a p3-900 with 192 MB sdram and geforce2 GTS card, using win2k SP1 with game compat update, as well as all updated drivers(6.67 detonator), and disabled servies to the gaming/internet minimum

[Spaceman 0]

I run all my games at the high setting with no problems. I use the batch file I found on this site instead of game launcher. But can't say this enough never ever ever never ever run an app in realtime.

[emthompson 0]

Thunderbird 1ghz

soyo sy-k7vta w/updated drivers

128mb

geforce mx w/updated drivers

 

I am experiencing difficulties trying to get unreal tourny to run on my system. I have updated my bios, win2k, video card, and the drivers for the agp stuff. I still cant get the game to stop being choppy. It is running at about 55 fps. My system also seems to be running slower since i swiched to win 2k (from ME). If you could give any advice that would be great.

[clutch 1]

Get more RAM. You could tweak the hell out of it in an attempt to fix it, but more RAM will get you a lot further. I have used 256MB the whole time, and never had a problem. I have heard others talk about how going from 128 to 256MB fixed their UT stuttering problems.

 

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Regards,

 

clutch

[oldspice 0]

when SR2 comes out all the stuttering problems will be gone in win2k. This is a fabulous update for win2k

[JoeFan 0]

What batch file do you use to play games i can't get many games to work in 2000 is there a fix for that?

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Spaceman:

I run all my games at the high setting with no problems. I use the batch file I found on this site instead of game launcher. But can't say this enough never ever ever never ever run an app in realtime.</font>

[Intlharvester 0]

I would imagine that the batchfile is just START /HIGH %1, but if not, I'd be interested to here what's in there.

[ThC 129 0]

**Begin rant please skip post if you dont want to read it****

 

 

for the people that dont understand why you need more ram for win2k it is because there are services that are constantly running so your memory's priority goes toward these. 9x doesnt have services and that is why it crashes so much. So with more ram there will be enough free resources to run the games and services sufficently without using swap file space. SO GET MORE RAM WHILE IT IS CHEAP. Other than that there isn't a general way to make your performance better other than drivers and patches.

 

As for the D3D performance issue i run most of my games in OpenGL because of that reason. I don't like M$ api's like D3D.

 

Good hardware is key too. If you have good name brand **** in Win2k that is well the best or within the top 3 products win2k is less likely to **** up. The people with good hardware don't post half as many problems than the ones with cheap **** .

 

Anyway all i have to say is that the vetrans should try and be nicer to the newer people here rather than just flaming them on their 1st post on something, people need to learn and shouting at them and making fun of them doesnt encourage them to try and learn from a mistake.

 

***** END RANT****

 

Have a nice day

[Splat 0]

I too made the plunge and moved from 128k to 256k (0nly £ 50) and the difference is staggering, especially with UT - no more contstant disk access and paging, no more crashes and errors on exit, no more choppy framerates, just pure constant framerates, however sound under my SB 1024 is another matter...have fun.

[Galilee 0]

echo off

 

start /high hl.exe

 

After the game file, extensions can be added like -console, etc.

The bat file has to be in the same directory as the game.

But personally I use Windows Game launcher, it works great.

[mner70 0]

I' ve recently reinstall W2k and on purpose I tried sacrifice demo, real myst demo, project igi and deus ex with the original DX7 of w2k and DX8.0a which I downloaded from microsoft web site.

Except Deus Ex everything run slower with DX8 than with DX7. With DX7 and a fresh install of w2k the performance was good and maybe close with the performance on WinME which I also have installed but I do not have the numbers to really proof all that and really see how good is win2k with DX games against Win9x or Me.

I use win2k for one year now. They are stable but they have problems, at least for me. I've noticed that under memory stressed conditions some applications fail to execute (For example Vision for PCTV Rave Tv Tuner card). My USB PSTN Modem (Supra max 56K) after 4 to 10 ten redials, when my ISP is busy, stops dialing and locks the port. To make it usable I must reinstall the drivers for it or reboot. My USB Radio tuner power offers every five to ten minutes. The only way to solve this is to launch the radio application with high or real time priority. In D3d all games flashes when I play them and this is very annoying (I have a MSI GeForce2 MX card with 6.49 Detonators).

The sound crackles (SB LIve Value + Liveware3).

These are problems that I had every time I have installed win2k in my pc. The weird thing is that with every installation problems arises that wasn't there before and they will not be in the next installation.

I reinstalled Win2k yesterday because for no reason all my user accounts except my administrator acount stopped working. I wanted to reinstall before that because registry has gone to 30 MBytes even with everything extra uninstalled and the winnt folder was over 800 Mbytes.

The problem with the uncontrollable growth of the registry is very annoying and the "reboot phenomenon" stays (maybe a little bit better this time).

I also observed that some times under CPU or memory stress conditions the installations of some applications gets corrupted and need reinstall to start work again (It happened with real player 8 many times but only when I had 128 MB memory installed on my system and with some other programs. Task manager many times gives wrong readings about memory or cpu usage because it can't be half of the ram to be available and the cpu usage is low as 10% and notepad takes 10 sec to open.

I wrote all these because I want to know if these are my problems or everyone has a share of them..!

[clutch 1]

What are the specs of your system? I would be interested to know. The observations on memory performance seem odd to me, since a major reason why I use Win2K is for it's superior memory management abiltiy over the 9x OS.

 

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Regards,

 

clutch

[mner70 0]

The specs are:

 

Pentium III 450

Elite P6BX-A+

224 Mb RAM

MSI GeForce2 MX

Q. Fireball ATA 66 20.4 Gb

SB Live Value

Pinnacle PCTV Rave TV Tuner

Supra MAX 56K USB Modem

NEC DV-5500A DVD-ROM 8X

and some other USB devices

 

By the way searching this site I find that

there is this key in the registry for NT:

 

HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

SecondLevelDataCache

 

It defines the amount of Second Level Data Cache the OS uses. The article says that NT always uses 256 (Kbytes) regardless the CPU (Mine for example has 512 Kbytes L2). So I digged in my registry and found that for my installation was 0 and not 256 (the installation is very, very fresh). I' ve changed it myself to 512 and everything still runs fine.

After that what can I think about the memory management.

Also what about the virtual memory?

I've heard that you may have tons of RAM but if you don't have a pagefile the system may don't even boot. This is definitely true for Win9x but for Win2K I cannot verify this. Is it true?

Linux (which I don't like very much) uses what ever it has and works well even with no swap file (partition) if you have enough memory)

[clutch 1]

The cache mod doesn't apply to PII processors or newer.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q183/0/63.ASP

 

As far as the swap file goes, unless you are running some memory intensive applications (CAD/Solid modeling, Database development, compiling, etc) I wouldn't recommend going over 250MB. In addition, have you checked for any BIOS/driver updates for your hardware? There may be some updates that would help you out.

 

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Regards,

 

clutch

[mner70 0]

Thanks for the informations!