Userinput for those considering buying this app

Hello. (Game: RIFT)
I was looking around for a good "repeater" program for 2 clients as i run them on same machine but on different monitors.
Managed to set everything up fairly easy (working with IT but i believe anyone can set it up with the guides provided). and got the game running within 5minutes.
Then it took another 30-45 minutes to set up those keys i wanted (summon horse at the same time, follow maincharacter, assist maincharacter, and 1-2-3-4 for combat abilitys).
I was happy and i got everything set up as i wanted and it worked without any struggles !

However, if you 2-box you will lose alot of FPS.
My machine went from almost idle when running 2 instances of rift to full load (i tried all different cpu configuration).
I could feel the lagg clearly. (went from 30-35FPS on each client to 15-20FPS and 55C to 74C full load)
my specc: ASUS Rampage Formula IV Socket 2011, Intel Core i7-3960X, 2x ASUS HD7970 3GB DCII TOP OC (crossfire), 16gb Dominator CL9 memory at 2000hz, revodrive 3 240gb (1tb read/write ssd in pci-e slot).

Verdict:
If you want a easy program to use for sending commands to both clients, then its defiantly worth 10 dollar to try it out for 90 days!
But dont expect anything close to just running 2 clients straight up in performance. (im one of those picky fps geeks, ill stick to moving mouse over to client2 and press the keys there with same keybinding layout on both characters: in my case it makes it alot easier when secondary is a mage with alot of ground ae's i need to click out when grinding.)

3.6 out of 5 sophy-stars !

- 11/11hk - sophy -

[MiRai]

It's always nice to see someone new post feedback about their new user experiences with ISBoxer.

On that note, people are running 5 RIFT clients on machines with much less horsepower than yours. I think you might want to double
check the video settings that you're currently using. I'm almost positive that RIFT requires the game client to be in the foreground in
order to accept commands from another window. This will make all windows try to run at 60 FPS. The reason you were most likely
seeing lower CPU usage when manually running the games yourself is because the game client automatically drops to a super low
FPS when it's not in focus, therefore, massively reducing its impact on the system.

You also have 2 video cards. Are you running Crossfire? It is documented throughout these forums and on the Wiki that CF provides
little to no benefit while multiboxing and that it may actually hurt performance. It's recommended that you disable CF if it's enabled.

It's always nice to see someone new post feedback about their new user experiences with ISBoxer.

On that note, people are running 5 RIFT clients on machines with much less horsepower than yours. I think you might want to double
check the video settings that you're currently using. I'm almost positive that RIFT requires the game client to be in the foreground in
order to accept commands from another window. This will make all windows try to run at 60 FPS. The reason you were most likely
seeing lower CPU usage when manually running the games yourself is because the game client automatically drops to a super low
FPS when it's not in focus, therefore, massively reducing its impact on the system.

You also have 2 video cards. Are you running Crossfire? It is documented throughout these forums and on the Wiki that CF provides
little to no benefit while multiboxing and that it may actually hurt performance. It's recommended that you disable CF if it's enabled.

Hello and thanks for a quick reply, even tho this was no support or technical issue-related
But ill provide as much info as possible for anyone curious:
I set the secondary screen to always be "in background" and the main one to be "in foreground" under the display settings of ISBoxer. I also read about the missing support for crossfire/sli so ive hooked my 2x HD7970 as a single card each which run 1 monitor each. I notice all the rift 5-man duoboxing with HEAVY lagg on youtube, no one runs smooth so i figured my 2-boxing might work but there was no information to be found on 2boxing for ISBoxer, so i tried it out! Note that there is a fps cap being forced by the trashy rift code Trion put together, ive had a support ticket with them for a long time (when my main showed 20fps and secondary 60fps, everywhere). And they, trion, stated that no client should be able to get above 55 true fps when more then 2 characters in the vicinity. Ive also tried thridparty and hardware fps recordingtools (u can hook those up to HD7970, awesome feature btw).

w/o isboxer duobox
main: 37 fps in town (world: 45)
secondary: 25fps in town (world: 30)
Just 1 char: 50 all over (cept for akylios, drops to 45 when attack music starts)

w/ isboxer
main: 17 fps in town (world: 22)
secondary: 11 fps in town (world: 17)


But this is my personal opinion/feeling, i bet some ppl would say i didnt lagg (after watching those 5 man boxers and ppl who usaly duobox alot), but 2-3 glitchy frames in a row is my limit (that picky fps nerd i related to earlier requires smoothness ^^). So for (me) duobox its basicly easier to just run 2 windows for Rift, would be awesome if repeater for some keys could be a standalone plugin sometime in the future when there is unlimited founds and time! But this application rocks for those who aint picky about losing a fps or 2!
Thank you !

edit: i will run a few dungeons on Wednesday when im back and post statistics from a longer parse.

[lax]

Are you kidding, how is this not support related. That's a lot of FPS to have lost for only 2 windows. People are playing entire groups in RIFT with this software. I would suggest that you have misconfigured something for your hardware, which is easy to do when you have multiple GPUs.

I also read about the missing support for crossfire/sli so ive hooked my 2x HD7970 as a single card each which run 1 monitor each.

I'm not sure you understood what you read if you read it as "missing support for crossfire/sli". This isn't something that depends on ISBoxer supporting it, it depends on the game and the video drivers. Running games in windowed mode with Crossfire or SLI may result in the second GPU idling. That's without IS/ISBoxer.

But okay, still depending on your Window Layout choices you may be accepting the performance hit, and it would help to see your CPU settings, etc as well. See HOWTO: Share your configuration for better support and show me what you've got configured.

[MiRai]

What I'm getting at is that, according to your numbers using only 2 game clients, 5 boxing would be impossible because the frame rates
would be so low you wouldn't be able to get anything done.

I'll use Alge's video as a reference. He's capturing the entire desktop so you can see his slave windows and his Video FX. This takes much
more CPU usage overall than just hooking onto the game client and recording it by itself. I cannot specifically recall what hardware he is
using in that video, but I guarantee it's much less powerful than anything in your machine (I'm sure he'll see this thread and respond).

Now, 20FPS on the main window and we'll say he's capped the slave windows at 10FPS. So that's 20FPS + 40FPS (4 slaves x 10 FPS) = 60
FPS overall output from the video card. Your 2 game clients are getting approximately the same FPS output from those monster video
cards of yours and this is why I'm pointing the finger at something in your configuration.

Are you kidding, how is this not support related. That's a lot of FPS to have lost for only 2 windows. People are playing entire groups in RIFT with this software. I would suggest that you have misconfigured something for your hardware, which is easy to do when you have multiple GPUs.

I also read about the missing support for crossfire/sli so ive hooked my 2x HD7970 as a single card each which run 1 monitor each.

I'm not sure you understood what you read if you read it as "missing support for crossfire/sli". This isn't something that depends on ISBoxer supporting it, it depends on the game and the video drivers. Running games in windowed mode with Crossfire or SLI may result in the second GPU idling. That's without IS/ISBoxer.

But okay, still depending on your Window Layout choices you may be accepting the performance hit, and it would help to see your CPU settings, etc as well. See HOWTO: Share your configuration for better support and show me what you've got configured.

What i ment with "no support" is basicly that Rift (trion) have stated they have full support for SLI/Crossfire for Rift (depending on drivers ofc, but they have a list on their site which are supported), when running 2 clients the focused client shouldnt suffer any loss from the second one, if your cards can handle it. But with ISBoxer this support is renderd "unsupported", hence "no support", maybe i should have used the frasing: "put in the dark", sorry! What other games do and dont is not being discussed here but there are some neat sli/crossfire onces out there that support utilizing both cards even if more then 1 client.
Edit: And i dont run them in Crossfire when testing ISBoxer

here is my current configuration
http://www.privatepaste.com/411be8d1d8
note that ive tried all diffrent cpu configurations, this shows only the last one i saved (tried everything from 1 core to 8 cores divided by phi and multipliable by piximagic)
Note that i tried "false" and "true" on following setting: <LockForeground>xxxxxx</LockForeground> and i set the backgroundfps to cap at 10.
And:
Trust me, my configuration works perfectly with Rift and Rift duobox untill ISBoxer comes into play (for my taste). it still runs really good!
Rift caps at 55 fps, its in the actually game code stated by trion (for each client, so i get almost 110fps when running both in core output).
With ISboxer i get around 70-80fps core, but its devided on the both clients. even if i run the second client minimized or in background on 1 screen (or small window in the corner) i still get this loss. I tried to 4 box and i have same fps (1-2 less for each client i add) as when i duobox.Which gives ISBox an huge advantage if you run more then 2 clients.

Edit: thanks for that link, ill check it out if there is something i could do differently atm.
Edit 2: aaah! thats the video i started checking out btw, he laggs reaaaaly bad ^^, maybe i should mention i use 2 3rd party fps trackers (1hw and 1sw), my numbers are not from the ISBoxer info, that shows 30fps static on both chars at all time (sometimes 40, static number then aswell), even if backgroundwindow fps is set to 10 as max and low.

[Alge]

I was taking a huge hit to FPS from video capturing the whole desktop (two monitors) in that video. I actually dialled my foreground/background settings way down to get some stability in my FPS for that video.

I'm not playing RIFT any more but when I get home I will be able to post some hardware specs and I think I have some records of FPS I was getting on 5 clients.

I was taking a huge hit to FPS from video capturing the whole desktop (two monitors) in that video. I actually dialled my foreground/background settings way down to get some stability in my FPS for that video.

I'm not playing RIFT any more but when I get home I will be able to post some hardware specs and I think I have some records of FPS I was getting on 5 clients.

Thanks please do.
I drop some from just running 2 clients straight up compaired with ISboxer, for my taste it feels alot more "hacky"/"choppy" (dont know the word for it, but rather then lower fps it feels like it skips a few).
just notice i freeze up 1-2 seconds on mainclient whenever there is some new stuff poping etc. no freeze on second client. No issues without ISBoxer to.

Here is the latest configuration:
http://www.privatepaste.com/e9a8317956

[Alge]

I had my FPS limited to 30 FPS on my main with fairly high graphics settings and 15 FPS on my slaves with low graphics settings, all at 1920x1200 (full screen stacked window layout). I never run higher than 30FPS on my main because I can't tell the difference above that. FPS was rock solid at those levels even during invasions. I was also running a dxNothing window with full screen video FX of all my slaves and a bunch of other video FX. PC was an i7 2600K standard clocked, a Radeon HD 5850 1GB and 8GB of commodity RAM.

Given that you quote

w/ isboxer
main: 17 fps in town (world: 22)
secondary: 11 fps in town (world: 17)

with your hardware I'd say you have a problem.

[lax]

What i ment with "no support" is basicly that Rift (trion) have stated they have full support for SLI/Crossfire for Rift (depending on drivers ofc, but they have a list on their site which are supported), when running 2 clients the focused client shouldnt suffer any loss from the second one, if your cards can handle it. But with ISBoxer this support is renderd "unsupported", hence "no support", maybe i should have used the frasing: "put in the dark", sorry!

... I am still confused by what you are telling me about ISBoxer, because I told you SLI/Crossfire should operate identically with or without ISBoxer. You're telling me that with ISBoxer, SLI/Crossfire is "unsupported" and "put in the dark". I'm just telling you that SLI and Crossfire may not work in windowed mode, and that has only to do with the game, DirectX, and your video drivers. Not ISBoxer.

my numbers are not from the ISBoxer info, that shows 30fps static on both chars at all time (sometimes 40, static number then aswell), even if backgroundwindow fps is set to 10 as max and low.

First of all, if you're introducing some other program into the mix, that program can reduce performance against Inner Space and ISBoxer, sometimes when it would not otherwise be a problem. For example, simply run X-Fire or Mumble and enable their in-game overlay features, and see what happens to your FPS. You're going to end up with FPS like the FPS you're reporting -- half as good as it should be.

Secondly, Inner Space's FPS number is sustained FPS over 64 frames. The timing of each frame is recorded, and your current sustained FPS is calculated with the first and last timestamps. There are a number of ways to calculate your FPS, but if this method is not good enough for you then I think you will not be satisfied unless I just give you the raw time of each frame.

just notice i freeze up 1-2 seconds on mainclient whenever there is some new stuff poping etc

This sounds like texture loading and would not be any different with or without ISBoxer. 1-2 seconds is a long time to freeze in any situation, though. Including this one.


It's a cool story and all, I'm not disagreeing that you might be losing some FPS, but we are disagreeing on why you are losing FPS. If you launch an instance of a game with IS, and your FPS is halved, then something is wrong and it's not "Inner Space is slow" it's usually interference from another program, or a misconfiguration. This is probably not a case of having to fiddle with CPU Strategy, unless you want to set ISBoxer's FPS limits at 0 to rule out IS FPS limiting as a source of slowness for you. Rather, it's probably either directly related to your multiple GPUs (your config looks okay as far as that goes, but it is very common for someone who just got 2 video cards to be confused about how to actually use them), or other programs, or video drivers.

I would try shutting down other running programs.