FPS quandry

I have some strangeness that I've seen mentioned in various places but no concrete solution (maybe there isn't one).

I use ISBoxer to run EQ2 and have it all configure to launch with the appropriate profile, etc. When I use ISBoxer to launch the game it runs in a full-screen window (no title bar, task bar) which is great but I take hit of about 15 FPS.

If I run the exact same profile directly w/o using ISBoxer it still starts in a full-screen window but it runs at full speed (FPS).

I have no idea what the difference is between the two options. ISBoxer is obviously setting a lot of stuff that running it directly from the Everquest II profile doesn't do but I'm not sure what is the FPS hog. Is it something to do with the round-robin CPU stuff that it is doing?

[bob]

Three things come to mind. YMMV.

1. Under you character set, and then each slot, there is a performance tab. The "Limit framerate in foreground to" setting will be the upper limit that Innerspace/ISBoxer will try and prevent your game from going over, when that game is the active "main".

2. The CPU strategy could be limiting your games. You can check this by monitoring each core instance and seeing some cores are pegging out.

3. Multiple instances of games behave differently when running in Innerspace/ISBoxer to outside of it. This is easily seen by when you run a single game instance outside, and it is not the current active window, most games go into a less performance intensive loop (lets call this the "idle" loop). This is because the programmers have designed it this way knowing that the game will not get any input when it is not the foreground.
So when you run multiple copies outside of Innerspace/ISBoxer, the foreground window is in the games "active" loop, and the background windows are in the "idle" loop. This is easily measurable by viewing the CPU/GPU usage of each instance.
When running games in Innerspace/ISBoxer, they are tricked into thinking they are all the foreground window, so they all run in the "active" loop, and thus take more processing requirements. The net result is that the "main" window will have less FPS because it is sharing resources.


If none of these apply, there may be something else going on all together, e.g. Antivirus real time protection or other malware detection may not like Innerspace because it is launching other processes and then feeding input to it, or you may have some overlay software (mumble). You may need to monitor your computers resources to locate the problem. There is a wiki page to help you even. http://isboxer.com/wiki/HOWTO:Tweak_your_framerate

I want to thank you for the speedy and concise response. I wanted to reply earlier but couldn't get on from my work computer when I was thinking about it.;p

In any event - I have made a few tweaks and it is running quite a bit better but I think there is more to do, so I'll be looking into the link you sent.

Thanks again!