TR Forums

Hello TRers! (is that even a term here?)

Around last week, one of the managers I know from work showed me this application that changes the timer resolution within Windows and showed me a video to demonstrate the effects of it on Crysis from a youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hcuYiqib9I

Apparently, this application changes the time resolution so that the affected application performs better at the cost of using much more CPU resources. With the example of Crysis 3, FPS went up. Now, after showing me that video, it reminded of the FCAT stuff that TR was doing. So, I am curious as to how changing the timer resolution of Windows would affect FCAT results with frames displayed at the monitor? I assume that the frames recorded in the YouTube is the same place of the beginning of pipeline as where FRAPS does it recording (please correct me if I am wrong on that).

Moved to Windows forum.

Hmm... I wonder if I can use this towards StarCraft 2. I've experienced horrendous mothership lag and I just have to say a 30% jump in performance would be too much awesome, because everything else in that game runs flawlessly since I upgraded my CPU's from 5050's to 5160's.

Interesting. If I'm understanding the video (and the info on his web site) correctly, this is essentially a way to force Windows to enable the high-res multimedia timer even if the application doesn't explicitly request it. Any latency-sensitive application (which would include pretty much all FPS-type games!) ought to be using the high-res timer already.

I guess it just goes to show that there are a lot of badly coded applications out there...

$10 is pretty steep for such a simple piece of software if I can just play a video in the background and achieve the same CPU benefit. Microsoft's web site also has open-sourced the code needed to set the timer resolution, you just need to compile it. Charging for that is pretty unfair.

Star Brood wrote:

$10 is pretty steep for such a simple piece of software if I can just play a video in the background and achieve the same CPU benefit. Microsoft's web site also has open-sourced the code needed to set the timer resolution, you just need to compile it. Charging for that is pretty unfair.

Do you think this is related?

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=376458

Star Brood wrote:

$10 is pretty steep for such a simple piece of software if I can just play a video in the background and achieve the same CPU benefit.

Playing a video in the background will use CPU and/or GPU cycles, so the benefit will likely be reduced.

Star Brood wrote:

Microsoft's web site also has open-sourced the code needed to set the timer resolution, you just need to compile it. Charging for that is pretty unfair.

No more unfair (and certainly less harmful) than utilizing shady business practices to gain a de facto monopoly in the desktop OS and office suite market.

If people are willing to shell out $10 for a trivial piece of software to fix games that are broken by design, just because they're not knowledgeable enough to download and compile the code for themselves, who are we to say someone shouldn't provide a product for that market?