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bitvector wrote:

Flying Fox wrote:

l33t-g4m3r wrote:

Now the OS i'd really like to use is linux, especially with the new 3d desktop, but alas, I own ati for video and creative for sound.

The proprietary DAAMIT drivers have been getting better. Once the open specs are released, open-source implementation of the drivers will start to ramp up. Contrast that to Nvidia which remains closed. Wait, you don't like DRM? Linux will have it eventually. So now what? Cry a little more? Like this dude that I was talking to? Then don't play games, stick with your old school OS and plaintext editor for everything.

Have any more FUD to spew? Linux will never have DRM in the same way as Windows, because the availability of source gives you a choice to change it.

Of course, but with the TPM stuff built right into the kernel one basically needs to create his/her own distro by recompiling the kernel and may be some other stuff. Not exactly a user friendly operation for the Sixpacks that buy his/her Linux computer from Walmart. Not yet anyway.

bitvector wrote:

And your implication is stupid. Opposing DRM is not equivalent to opposing technological progress and there's nothing hypocritical about being against DRM and still wanting to play games or watch movies.

On Windows however, the only way to not get the DRM stuff is to stay outdated, right? Unless the content owners turn around (and there are signs that they may, everyone should rejoice ), to consume those contents will require you to sign on to their DRM.

I don't understand people's obession with startup speed. Who powers down their computer all the way? I certainly don't. I don't exactly leave it running all the time either though. I put it to sleep when I'm at work or in bed. It takes about 5-10sec for my computer to "power on" in the morning when I wake up. It takes it quite a bit more than that to start up. But who cares because I only have to do that maybe once every couple weeks. It doesn't really matter to me as a metric of speed because I don't obsessively reboot my computer all the time.

Flying Fox wrote:

bitvector wrote:

Have any more FUD to spew? Linux will never have DRM in the same way as Windows, because the availability of source gives you a choice to change it.

Of course, but with the TPM stuff built right into the kernel one basically needs to create his/her own distro by recompiling the kernel and may be some other stuff. Not exactly a user friendly operation for the Sixpacks that buy his/her Linux computer from Walmart. Not yet anyway.

Well, they won't need to do it anyway. All it takes is a few technical people who are interested in the same goal. And realistically, even though Linux does support that stuff (they have TPM support and TrustedGrub already, for example), given the community and the spirit of open-source politics, I find the assumption that all of the odious DRM stuff would be enabled by default in all distros (and not disable-able) to be laughable.

Taddeusz wrote:

I don't understand people's obession with startup speed. Who powers down their computer all the way? I certainly don't. I don't exactly leave it running all the time either though. I put it to sleep when I'm at work or in bed. It takes about 5-10sec for my computer to "power on" in the morning when I wake up. It takes it quite a bit more than that to start up. But who cares because I only have to do that maybe once every couple weeks. It doesn't really matter to me as a metric of speed because I don't obsessively reboot my computer all the time.

My electrec bill would sky rocket if I did that.

Kulith wrote:

Taddeusz wrote:

I don't understand people's obession with startup speed. Who powers down their computer all the way? I certainly don't. I don't exactly leave it running all the time either though. I put it to sleep when I'm at work or in bed. It takes about 5-10sec for my computer to "power on" in the morning when I wake up. It takes it quite a bit more than that to start up. But who cares because I only have to do that maybe once every couple weeks. It doesn't really matter to me as a metric of speed because I don't obsessively reboot my computer all the time.

My electrec bill would sky rocket if I did that.

I wouldn't know why... the only extra power used in sleep mode is to keep the RAM refreshed. For all other intents and purposes the computer is effectively powered off while sleeping. All hard drives and fans are spun down. The power supply is only supplying enough power to refresh RAM. Nothing else is happening. So, how exactly would this cause your power bill to skyrocket?

To put the cherry on top coming out of sleep is a heck of a lot shorter wait than powering on from a cold start.

My PC running Vista 64-bit pulls a massive 2 watts from the outlet when it is hibernating.

Da_Boss wrote:

Madman wrote:

Da_Boss wrote:

Madman wrote:

NeXus 6 wrote:

Fighterpilot wrote:

You turned off Superfetch directly after an install?....You fully live up to your nickname then.

LOL! Superfetch is one feature that should NOT be turned off if you want to gain some perfromance in Vista.

Do your homework before suggesting other people WRONG things.

Superfetch is loading mediaplayers, solitare and other crap in your RAM from backup threads while you are doing your work. Therefore using HDD and Memory and Eating out zero pages. It's the last thing you want to keep running on laptop with battery power or while gaming!

I double checked, just to be sure, with superprefetch I get a lot more disk activity while gaming than I do without it!

Thats the point of superfetch. It fills some of your unused RAM with programs you use often. With superfetch, firefox and wmp11 open in a flash. It's acually one of the things i really appreciate about vista. neXus is right. Once vista has a good idea of the programs you use regularily, it loads them into RAM so when you start them, they open instantly.

It's fine till you start a program that needs all the RAM it can get. Then it has to do extra housekeeping to free the one that has been filled with .NET assemblies and recently or never used applications.

In that case, i guess it just comes down to this: Would you rather have your everyday applications load faster, or have your games and other memory intensive applications load faster? Im my opinion, I love to see my browser open as soon as i click it. Yours may differ. At least windows gives you a choice, and thats hardly anything to complain about.

Memory is allocated and deallocated so quickly in comparison to loading information from the hard drive that I doubt that it is a choice between one or the other and I believe he could have both if he simply left the SuperFetch feature on and waited a few days.

Shining Arcanine wrote:

...

Not really, if you are trying to squeeze 20fps from video or renderer, you WILL notice 50MB of memory being freed, zeroed and allocated in another process again. No to mention that you never know when the AI will think of something cool behind your back.

Madman wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote:

...

Not really, if you are trying to squeeze 20fps from video or renderer, you WILL notice 50MB of memory being freed, zeroed and allocated in another process again. No to mention that you never know when the AI will think of something cool behind your back.

You seem to have discredited it from the onset. What kind of stance is that to take? Unless you try it yourself, you are in no way in a position to make a qualified statement about whether it hurts or not.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Madman wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote:

...

Not really, if you are trying to squeeze 20fps from video or renderer, you WILL notice 50MB of memory being freed, zeroed and allocated in another process again. No to mention that you never know when the AI will think of something cool behind your back.

You seem to have discredited it from the onset. What kind of stance is that to take? Unless you try it yourself, you are in no way in a position to make a qualified statement about whether it hurts or not.

Recently I VTuned a software that did some memory zeroing on large buffers twice, and know what, it really takes time Put that thing on critical path and you got a bottleneck.

And as I've repeated more than once, I don't care about super fetch as of now. I have absolutely zero complains about application startup times, I have problems with Vista stuttering when XP runs smooth, and everything leads to believe that poor memory management or just the lack of it is at fault.

You are forcing me to turn on features that can only make things worse.

Flying Fox suggested that I can get a Alchemy for Audigy and that helped, because it dropped CPU load below 100%. But super fetch that you suggested is not a cure, its a feature I don't need, and which eats through RAM and HDD queues.

EDIT: By the way, as I already wrote in this thread, I tried it, and all I got was higher memory and HDD load

Madman wrote:

Recently I VTuned a software that did some memory zeroing on large buffers twice, and know what, it really takes time Put that thing on critical path and you got a bottleneck.

That seems like a coding problem where it is performance critical but they didn't do the large alloc ahead of time?

Madman wrote:

EDIT: By the way, as I already wrote in this thread, I tried it, and all I got was higher memory and HDD load

And as we have all said, higher memory is a good thing (why waste it by leaving it empty), and it takes a few days for it to 'learn' and the hdd use levels off. Sheesh.

Well if superfetch is slowing down the rest of your programs that you don't use as frequently at the expensive speeding up a few programs that you use more frequently, I don't see the advantage of such a program. Why not just program superfect so that it observes which programs are used more first, and then implement the solution efficiently like Compusa's experience, instead of getting in the way before it's useful?

Nitrodist wrote:

Well if superfetch is slowing down the rest of your programs that you don't use as frequently at the expensive speeding up a few programs that you use more frequently, I don't see the advantage of such a program. Why not just program superfect so that it observes which programs are used more first, and then implement the solution instead of getting in the way all of the time?

*sigh*
It doesn't really get in the way (unless you are running 512MB ram). It just doesn't speed things up until after it has learned. I still don't think it ever slows anything down, even while learning, unless you are doing something that is extremely hard-drive intensive for long periods of time.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Nitrodist wrote:

Well if superfetch is slowing down the rest of your programs that you don't use as frequently at the expensive speeding up a few programs that you use more frequently, I don't see the advantage of such a program. Why not just program superfect so that it observes which programs are used more first, and then implement the solution instead of getting in the way all of the time?

*sigh*
It doesn't really get in the way (unless you are running 512MB ram). It just doesn't speed things up until after it has learned. I still don't think it ever slows anything down, even while learning, unless you are doing something that is extremely hard-drive intensive for long periods of time.

Well, I don't run Vista so I can't really say anything, but from what Madman is saying it's really affecting him. Maybe it's a case of the Placebo effect. That is, just knowing how superfetch works and that it's enabled on the system may be affecting his judgement.

edit; btw, I ninja edited my post to make it more to what I was thinking. Also, I ninja edited this thing too

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Madman wrote:

EDIT: By the way, as I already wrote in this thread, I tried it, and all I got was higher memory and HDD load

And as we have all said, higher memory is a good thing (why waste it by leaving it empty), and it takes a few days for it to 'learn' and the hdd use levels off. Sheesh.

If you do have a memory hogging application then I can see this as a problem. Although in that case the application should probably pre-allocate the big blocks of memory that it wants first to have it flush out the superfetch cache. Anyway we are not talking Sixpack user scenarios here.

And remember, you can always get more RAM.

Flying Fox wrote:

Madman wrote:

Recently I VTuned a software that did some memory zeroing on large buffers twice, and know what, it really takes time Put that thing on critical path and you got a bottleneck.

That seems like a coding problem where it is performance critical but they didn't do the large alloc ahead of time?

The block was allocated at app start and it was costly compared to the rest of the logic. Still, going STL or custom algo route and reimplementing the stuff is not allays worth the effort. Since the block was zeroed twice, just fixing the bug helped a lot. Redoing the logic even more efficiently is too time consuming for the gain right now.

Still, the fact that zeroing buffer twice can actually add noticeable slowdown in otherwise fast app means only that it takes time and is not free as air as people tend to think. Thats why there are all those string.reserves and stuff. Dynamic memory == expensive, especially when fragmented or paged.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Madman wrote:

EDIT: By the way, as I already wrote in this thread, I tried it, and all I got was higher memory and HDD load

And as we have all said, higher memory is a good thing (why waste it by leaving it empty), and it takes a few days for it to 'learn' and the hdd use levels off. Sheesh.

BECAUSE THE FRIGGIN MEMORY IN XP IS NOT EMPTY!!!

Difference is that Vista loads .NET crap there, XP leaves it free only till I load something. When I do so, memory is given to MY app, and if I change levels, minimize it, data is just marked as free, but can still be soft faulted back into the app at first request.

In Vista AI will gladly start to write solitaires and .NET frameworks all over the place as soon as the view frustum moves! So there is no chance the data will get soft faulted back! It's gone, you need to read it back from HDD, FORCEFULLY zeroing all solitaire and .NET pages first. DOH!!!

Madman wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Madman wrote:

EDIT: By the way, as I already wrote in this thread, I tried it, and all I got was higher memory and HDD load

And as we have all said, higher memory is a good thing (why waste it by leaving it empty), and it takes a few days for it to 'learn' and the hdd use levels off. Sheesh.

BECAUSE THE FRIGGIN MEMORY IN XP IS NOT EMPTY!!!

Difference is that Vista loads .NET crap there, XP leaves it free only till I load something. When I do so, memory is given to MY app, and if I change levels, minimize it, data is just marked as free, but can still be soft faulted back into the app at first request.

In Vista AI will gladly start to write solitaires and .NET frameworks all over the place as soon as the view frustum moves! So there is no chance the data will get soft faulted back! It's gone, you need to read it back from HDD, FORCEFULLY zeroing all solitaire and .NET pages first. DOH!!!

Have you ever seen XP use more than like 300mb of RAM when sitting there? That's empty.
You seem to have a penchant against .NET, which I don't really understand.

Nitrodist wrote:

Well if superfetch is slowing down the rest of your programs that you don't use as frequently at the expensive speeding up a few programs that you use more frequently, I don't see the advantage of such a program. Why not just program superfect so that it observes which programs are used more first, and then implement the solution efficiently like Compusa's experience, instead of getting in the way before it's useful?

OMG! I just said super fetch and everyone is like oh hell, Madman just shot his PC with a shotgun and is now complaining.

XP didn't had this service and didn't had this problem. And I only said it's off to better describe the overall system state. Turning ADDITIONAL services from Vista off should bring it only closer to XP behavior, which was FAST and SNAPPY!

Yet everyone sees marketing buzzword and thinks, oh crap, he should turn more crap on to make this thing faster

Madman wrote:

OMG! I just said super fetch and everyone is like oh hell, Madman just shot his PC with a shotgun and is now complaining.

XP didn't had this service and didn't had this problem. And I only said it's off to better describe the overall system state. Turning ADDITIONAL services from Vista off should bring it only closer to XP behavior, which was FAST and SNAPPY!

Yet everyone sees marketing buzzword and thinks, oh crap, he should turn more crap on to make this thing faster

The fact of the matter is is, Vista + Superfetch is much snappier than XP is.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Madman wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Madman wrote:

EDIT: By the way, as I already wrote in this thread, I tried it, and all I got was higher memory and HDD load

And as we have all said, higher memory is a good thing (why waste it by leaving it empty), and it takes a few days for it to 'learn' and the hdd use levels off. Sheesh.

BECAUSE THE FRIGGIN MEMORY IN XP IS NOT EMPTY!!!

Difference is that Vista loads .NET crap there, XP leaves it free only till I load something. When I do so, memory is given to MY app, and if I change levels, minimize it, data is just marked as free, but can still be soft faulted back into the app at first request.

In Vista AI will gladly start to write solitaires and .NET frameworks all over the place as soon as the view frustum moves! So there is no chance the data will get soft faulted back! It's gone, you need to read it back from HDD, FORCEFULLY zeroing all solitaire and .NET pages first. DOH!!!

Have you ever seen XP use more than like 300mb of RAM when sitting there? That's empty.
You seem to have a penchant against .NET, which I don't really understand.

For the third, and I hope last time, read this -> http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archi ... -game.aspx

I will admit that I love coding in C/C++ way more than in .NET, and I hate when 'hello world' app loads for 10 seconds and eats 50MB, but that's another story.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Madman wrote:

OMG! I just said super fetch and everyone is like oh hell, Madman just shot his PC with a shotgun and is now complaining.

XP didn't had this service and didn't had this problem. And I only said it's off to better describe the overall system state. Turning ADDITIONAL services from Vista off should bring it only closer to XP behavior, which was FAST and SNAPPY!

Yet everyone sees marketing buzzword and thinks, oh crap, he should turn more crap on to make this thing faster

The fact of the matter is is, Vista + Superfetch is much snappier than XP is.

I also said that it is faster without super fetch as well when working with desktop stuff, but that's kinda expected with 7900GT powering all that Aero thing.

Put something heavyweight on and Vista crawls

EDIT: [to make things more compact ]

Flying Fox wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Madman wrote:

EDIT: By the way, as I already wrote in this thread, I tried it, and all I got was higher memory and HDD load

And as we have all said, higher memory is a good thing (why waste it by leaving it empty), and it takes a few days for it to 'learn' and the hdd use levels off. Sheesh.

If you do have a memory hogging application then I can see this as a problem. Although in that case the application should probably pre-allocate the big blocks of memory that it wants first to have it flush out the superfetch cache.

From my observations it doesn't stop super fetch from paging parts of that memory out while it's running.

Flying Fox wrote:

And remember, you can always get more RAM.

Two weeks hasn't passed since I added 1Gig to my box, that was few days before Vista install. And I managed to test overall feel in XP and Vista with 2Gigs.

I guess I will have to get 2 more sticks

You seem to think the .NET stuff takes over 1gig of memory in the Superfetch cache? I don't think so. There is something else going on in whatever code you are looking at. There are other ways to deal with memory allocation, like plugging in your own STL allocator, using different heaps and stuff. They don't necessarily involve refactoring a lot of the existing code.

The memory shell game article that you linked did not mention anything about hiding the .NET runtime and all that in superfetch and stuff which supports your argument that "superfetch causes my apps to slow down a lot, so Vista sucks". It may suck for you, but you seem to be conveniently leave that out of your thread subject, which seems to indicate you may be trying to provoke with a bit of sensationalism.

For people who still have 16-bit apps that they rely on with their business, 64-bit Windows also suck for them too. Should they all go scream on top of their lungs that "Vista x64 sucks"?

Yeah, why not just go back to XP? It's not like anyone's forcing you to stick with Vista.

Madman wrote:

I also said that it is faster without super fetch as well when working with desktop stuff, but that's kinda expected with 7900GT powering all that Aero thing.

Put something heavyweight on and Vista crawls

Define heavyweight. I have yet to find anything that slows down Vista at all on both my machines (they both have 2gb of RAM and are dual-core). Loading and application switching is stutter-less. This includes video encoding.

Have you tried any other games than that NFS? I run games regularly, both OpenGL and Direct3D, and they all play smooth as silk on my machine. I'm running Vista 64-bit, 2GB RAM and a Radeon x1950xt. I couldn't be happier with the performance of my machine. I haven't disabled any of the services and it runs just peachy!

Nitrodist wrote:

Yeah, why not just go back to XP? It's not like anyone's forcing you to stick with Vista.

He's a programmer so that means he probably needs to test his apps on the new OS and see if it can run on it. Looks like there is some work for him to do in order to get his apps to run a bit better on the new OS. Of course, that can't stop programmers from whining a little about how much work they need to do.

Taddeusz wrote:

Have you tried any other games than that NFS? I run games regularly, both OpenGL and Direct3D, and they all play smooth as silk on my machine. I'm running Vista 64-bit, 2GB RAM and a Radeon x1950xt. I couldn't be happier with the performance of my machine. I haven't disabled any of the services and it runs just peachy!

Reading towards the end of this gives us an example: BF2. But hey, that is a well-known bad app.

Flying Fox wrote:

You seem to think the .NET stuff takes over 1gig of memory in the Superfetch cache? I don't think so. There is something else going on in whatever code you are looking at. There are other ways to deal with memory allocation, like plugging in your own STL allocator, using different heaps and stuff. They don't necessarily involve refactoring a lot of the existing code.

The memory shell game article that you linked did not mention anything about hiding the .NET runtime and all that in superfetch and stuff which supports your argument that "superfetch causes my apps to slow down a lot, so Vista sucks". It may suck for you, but you seem to be conveniently leave that out of your thread subject, which seems to indicate you may be trying to provoke with a bit of sensationalism.

For people who still have 16-bit apps that they rely on with their business, 64-bit Windows also suck for them too. Should they all go scream on top of their lungs that "Vista x64 sucks"?

Ok, to make things clear, Vista sucks for my use case scenario.
Developing memory intensive apps during working week and firing up Crysis, Need for speed: Pro street and stuff like that on weekends.

They all get noticeable if not massive stuttering on Vista.

I also have problems with hacking my sound drivers to get BACK hardware acceleration and ease off CPU load.

I have problems with all EAX presets in Creative console being GONE, I'm having problems with 5.1 up mix and 24bit sound output under Vista.

I have problems with the fact I brought more memory for Vista and still not having enough.

I'm having problems with the fact that memory load WITHOUT prefetch is higher than in XP by a LOT.

I'm having problems with the fact that superfetch is paging out Crysis memory while I'm playing it and stressing my HDD, therefore increasing power bill.

I'm having problem with the fact I paid for half broken OS.

I'm having problem that I wasted time to format HDD, set up apps, customized settings and now I have to go back or look for workarounds.

I'm having problem with the fact that marketing told total crap to Joe Sixpacks and even some people from this thread still believe that adding more load can make things go smoother