Video Performance

First of all, thank you for the trial! My week is almost up and I'm completely hooked The software is very polished - I just have one issue. I'll post here because I don't think it's game-specific.

Before ISBoxer, I used to run two windowed LOTRO clients at 2560x1600 at "Very High" graphics settings and just alt-tab between them. In crowded areas, I would have slow downs but the game was definitely playable. If I lowered one of the clients to "Medium", I would get fast frame rates and never experience any issues.

Using ISBoxer (Instant Swap On, 640x400 nested in front of 2560x1600), if I run both clients at "Very High", I consistently experience the following: Both monitors (I only use one for game windows) will flash black and then reload - it's almost identical to what happens when graphics drivers crash ("stopped responding and recovered..."). Most of the time I don't get any kind of error message though. After repeated tweaking, I can run a reliable session by having one client at "Medium" and one at "Low".

So I have one possible fix to the problem but I'm wondering why there would be such a big performance gap between running both clients in their own windows as opposed to running them together in Innerspace. In my old setup, didn't both windows continue to render in the background? I'm hoping that there isn't any real difference on GPU load and that I'm just missing some config option somewhere. Second, if this kind of performance drop is warranted, what options can I tweak to allow for higher graphics settings (would disabling Instant Swap help?) Thanks in advance!

(Hardware is E6850, 6GB RAM, GTX 285; per your post, cpu throttling is turned off; os is w7-64; nvidia drivers are up-to-date)

[Ualaa]

IS Boxer renders both clients, at the size of the larger region.
Because of the full size render, swaps can be instant and the mouse broadcast is very precise.

I'm guessing you didn't have both clients at maximum resolution, at the same time previously.
You effectively do, with IS Boxer.

Assuming LotRO allows /slash commands.
You could run a mapped key that lowers the settings for the slave(s), and raises them for the master with each switch.
I do this for Warcraft.

Alternatively, run them both at medium settings, or something similar.

[lax]

So I have one possible fix to the problem but I'm wondering why there would be such a big performance gap between running both clients in their own windows as opposed to running them together in Innerspace. In my old setup, didn't both windows continue to render in the background? I'm hoping that there isn't any real difference on GPU load and that I'm just missing some config option somewhere. Second, if this kind of performance drop is warranted, what options can I tweak to allow for higher graphics settings (would disabling Instant Swap help?) Thanks in advance!

You shouldn't see a significant performance drop just from running it with ISBoxer, if it's all running at the same resolution as before. One thing that is different is that, in order to provide broadcasting features for LOTRO, ISBoxer is having the game believe it is always the foreground window as per an option in your Character Set. You can disable this to see if that changes anything (besides being unable to broadcast to the window). It's possible that LOTRO was doing less in the background, but now does more because of this option. You can compensate for this by using the "Limit framerate in background" option which is available per Slot in your Character Set (click the Slot number, like 1, 2 ,3, i the left pane)

Disabling Instant Swap will increase your performance by asking the game to render it at the lower resolution most of the time, at the expense of taking a second or five to switch places. If you keep the same Aspect Ratio, you can potentially use the scaling option in Repeater to use mouse broadcasting still.

Thanks for the replies. (Ualaa, I did have both clients at max resolution before so nothing has changed there.)

I tried a couple of your suggestions today to no avail:

1. Turned off instant swap and ran both clients in full-resolution windows to see if either instant swap or the scaling that's involved was causing problems.
2. Turning "fake foreground" off does prevent broadcasting so I left that on and lowered background framerates to 10 on both slots. I think I will keep that as a permanent change but I still had driver crashes.

Poking around on the net seems to indicate that the "driver stopped responding and has recovered..." tends to be hardware related. However, since I didn't have these crashes in my previous setup, I don't think that is the case with me. Just in case, I did confirm that my temperatures were normal and vram seemed plenty. Memtest passed also.

My uninformed gut is telling me that it's not a stress/overload issue but the driver receiving bad instructions that are causing a lockup or overflow... Bad hardware tends to result in bsod's eventually - I haven't had a single one. The game has never crashed even. Just this resetting of the driver - often a couple times in a row - and then the game always recovers. The only other thing that is different between my previous setup and now is that I was running DX10 before and DX9 now. Could it be that DX10 just caused laggy graphics before and DX9 now crashes the driver? What happens if I set LOTRO to DX10 in-game? Also, will setting CPU affinity on a dual-core do much? (I will try both clients tomorrow on DX9 without Innerspace and try to reproduce the crashes...)

My apologies for wasting your time!!! I have confirmed that my issue has nothing to do with ISBoxer and is instead related to LOTRO / DirectX / Nvidia driver / CPU...

I ran my LOTRO clients on DX9 without IS and reproduced the same errors - should have thought of that earlier. Then, I compared some diagnostics while running them in DX10.

DX9: cpu usage 100%; gpu 50%; vram 500MB
DX10: cpu usage 70%; gpu 95%; vram 900MB

Clearly, DX10 utilizes more of my GPU which explains why I can run higher graphics settings without running into issues. With DX9, my cpu (showing it's age) was clearly the bottleneck and may be causing video driver crashes itself by not keeping up

Looks like I'll have to turn down my settings to use DX9 with ISBoxer unless there is some workaround. Unfortunately, GTX 285 can't do DX11.

[lax]

Looks like I'll have to turn down my settings to use DX9 with ISBoxer unless there is some workaround. Unfortunately, GTX 285 can't do DX11.

Actually the sad bit about that is that DirectX 11 will run on DirectX 9 hardware, and DirectX 11 can be installed on any PC with DirectX 10. I'm not really sure why Turbine is restricting their DirectX 11 engine to DirectX 11 hardware.

I may end up adding DirectX 10 support to Inner Space, but sadly the only people that stand to benefit from it are specifically LOTRO players with DirectX 10 hardware. And it's a bit time consuming for me to implement that. (Not to say it won't get done, just that I have higher priorities at the moment)