Eccentric performance on high-end hardware

Hello! Completely new to ISBoxer, and so far it has been an amazing experience.
However, I am having a very irritating performance problem when 5-boxing.

I have some pretty good hardware that should be absolutely up to the task:

• Intel Core i7 920, quad core @ 2.67GHz w/ hyper-threading (4 physical cores, 8 virtual)
• 12.0GB DDR3 RAM (8-8-8-20)
• Two ATI Radeon HD 4870 Cards (Crossfire is disabled, drivers updated last week)
• 2 TB RAID 5 (SCSI)
• Two monitors @ 1080p (one plugged into each gfx card)

I'm pretty sure I have only 2-3 trivial tweaks from the setup wizard's recommendations.
I am running the tank account on screen 1, and the other four accounts on screen 2.
I used the suggested method of in-game monitor settings to their default monitors.
Foreground FPS limit is 60, background FPS limit is 25. All video settings set to absolute minimum, sound off on every account but the tank's.

Most of the time, I get rock-solid performance.
60 FPS on the tank, 25 FPS on all the alts, no problem, never slows down.
This was in the starting zone, or in combat around there, running around, etc. No issues.

Yet randomly, the foreground window gets stuck around 15-30 FPS, and everything struggles.
These moments can be in areas with no people, where 5 mins later I will run by and get perfect performance.
It happens often after switching characters, and (get this) can often be resolved by rotating the character.
It seems like the FPS limit has to really "wake up" and go "oh, this guy should get 60 FPS now."
Clicking, moving, and rotating are all good ways to fix it, but randomly that won't work either.
Switching characters randomly, a bunch, also tends to make it go away.

To stress this point, switching characters is still instant, and the computer is performing fine.
I can switch over to Firefox and open a million tabs, open up an IDE and start coding, etc.
The computer is definitely not working that hard, and from I can tell the GPUs aren't anywhere near maximum either.
It's hard to pin down GPU since the ATI control panel only has current data, no histogram.
But I've never seen higher than 76% load on either card, and neither goes about 70 degrees C.

At first, I thought this was a CPU scheduling problem, so I set CPU affinity up.
Now I'm running tank on cores 1-4, two accounts on cores 5-6, and two accounts on cores 7-8.
No change, and my CPU is absolutely not being taxed anyway (all video settings for everyone are at minimum.)
I could spread the accounts out more (how to divide 5 accounts over 4 cores? ><) but I doubt that's the problem.


Needless to say, this is pretty irritating, thoughts?
My configuration is here: http://www.privatepaste.com/e0ff414f89

(Edit: Much to my chagrin, I just noticed the game-specific forums. Sorry for the misplaced thread.)

Research crawling the forum and results of experimentation:

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Based on a similar thread from someone with similar hardware/issues, it appears that using Direct-X 11 could yield significant improvements.

I changed to the development version of IS (which uses DX11), and I saw large improvements in FPS dips.
I still occasionally get strange FPS dips that shouldn't (in theory) be happening, they "catch up" to 60 FPS again very quickly.
It would be nice to know how long I should stick on the development version though.
Edit: this benefit seems to have been mostly placebo effect. I'm back where I started.

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There's another thread about running WoW across multiple monitors.
I already followed the guide mentioned, but I put up a reply asking for clarity on a post made by Lax on the issue.

To be clear, I am swapping games from monitor 1 to monitor 2.
Which are controlled by different cards. Which I believes violates Lax's rule of thumb.

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In other news, I discovered that my cards ship with a very aggressive thermal strategy in favor of silence.
I don't think it was causing performance issues, but overriding the silly default fan behavior has dropped temps to 60 C or lower.

[Ualaa]

If monitor one is plugged into video card A.
And monitor two is plugged into video card B.

Any character swap, will cause some degree of performance loss.
If both monitors are plugged into the same video card, you should get better performance when you swap toons.

If you never swap toons, you could create more than one warcraft profile.
And have each profile default to a different video card.
Which would be higher performance when you don't swap.
And even worse when you do.




I had problems when I upgraded my system.
My 4870X2 did not like either the new processor, ram or motherboard.

Old System:
Q6600, 4870X2, 8GB DDR2, Forget the motherboard.

New System:
i7 920, 4870X2, 12GB DDR3, Asus P6T motherboard.

Both Systems:
30" 2560x1600 monitor, 150GB Raptor HD, Vista 64-bit.

The card did not like the new system.
Slave windows would randomly get very slow.
And would have 1-2 freeze, almost every time I took a gryphon.
Had the issue with Keyclone, had the issue with IS Boxer.
Substituting the 4870X2 for a GTX275, and the problem went away.

Have since given the old Motherboard, Processor, Ram, Video Card to a friend.
His own hard drive, case, power supply, etc.
And there are no issues at all, including gaming.
Doubt it is the video card being bad, but it did conflict somehow.

Still not sure what the cause is/was.

Another update - I found the problem, but not the solution.

When I'm seeing this problem, my one card goes to 100% use and the other card goes to 0% use.
Not sure why this would be....

I think what happens is that one card ends up rendering ALL windows, even the one on the other window.
Because one card is completely idle during this time.

If you never swap toons, you could create more than one warcraft profile.
And have each profile default to a different video card.
Which would be higher performance when you don't swap.
And even worse when you do.

Ualaa, your hardware sounds near-identical to mine.
Could you fill me in on how to do separate WoW profiles?
I saw that one guide about multiple cards but am a tad confused.

I'm also a little frustrated since OFTEN I can swap characters willy-nilly and the performance hit is not noticeable.
The vast majority of the time, my big window gets 60 FPS and the others get 25 FPS, regardless of which character happens to be the big window.
Then occasionally, everything get's destroyed :/


Update: I'm having problems trying to prevent windows from swapping screens when I launch.
I apparently need "Swap Hot Character" on, or mouse broadcasting goes insane (resolution goes to "Custom" and can't be changed).
But with that option on, my master swaps to window 2 and back (because it's inactive while slaves launch), causing the issue I mentioned in post 1.

[lax]

Don't make separate WoW profiles. WoW has an option in the video options panel now. The guide on using multiple video cards explains how: http://isboxer.com/index.php/guides/21-using-multiple-video-cards. If you haven't assigned the specific monitors yet per the guide, that's going to be important

The simple way to stop swapping from happening, but keep all other behavior including mouse broadcasting, is to just change the Swap option so instead of Always, it's set to "when I press ______" and then you can use whatever hotkey you like to force it to swap if you really want to swap at some point even though it will cost in performance at the time.

Don't make separate WoW profiles. WoW has an option in the video options panel now. The guide on using multiple video cards explains how: http://isboxer.com/index.php/guides/21-using-multiple-video-cards. If you haven't assigned the specific monitors yet per the guide, that's going to be important

The simple way to stop swapping from happening, but keep all other behavior including mouse broadcasting, is to just change the Swap option so instead of Always, it's set to "when I press ______" and then you can use whatever hotkey you like to force it to swap if you really want to swap at some point even though it will cost in performance at the time.

I already did assign monitors per account; they are all set to the window they "live" on.

The problem with your solution (second paragraph), is that they still swap at the beginning.
That is, with "Swap Hot Character" and "Instant swap" and "when I press ___" enabled, they still swap while launching.

Every window starts on screen 1, then switches to screen 2, then (in the case of Window A) switches back to screen 1.
This causes the only-one-card-doing-all-the work issue, and I get terrible performance.



To clarify, my goal is to have 1 window on screen 1, and 4 windows on screen 2.
ATM, I have figured out how to do:

• A) Have the above setup, but with some form of swaps enabled. This means every window, while loading, swaps screens at least once. Because of the strange bug, the swaps make 1 gfx card do all the work and the performance is horrible. (Confirmed with ATI tool)
• B) Have the above setup, but with no swaps. Performance is great, but mouse broadcasting sucks because the slaves render at lower resolutions, so the mouse moved 4x as much on the slaves.

Obviously I want a third option C, get mouse broadcasting working without the windows swapping between screens while loading clients.
If I can also have swaps enabled for the rare case when I need it, that would be nice too.

I've pretty much given up, and am simply buying a single, beefy gfx card to run both monitors.
Thank you all for trying, I know there's InnerSpace & Windows limitations at play here.

[lax]

The card that does the work is unrelated to the monitor that it first shows up on. Your observation in that regard is wrong (sorry). The card that does the work is explicitly selected when setting up the Direct3D instance, regardless of which one the window might be on at the time. Both WoW and Inner Space have a method of selecting this option. Inner Space's setting will override WoW's setting; This is because most games don't have a setting and instead always use the primary monitor. If you have set it in both Inner Space and the game, this may be a source of your confusion. For WoW in particular, I recommend leaving Inner Space's setting at Application Defined, and select the monitor in WoW itself.

If you're getting the performance drop from your multiple cards, then what is happening without question is that at least one window is not CURRENTLY on a monitor on the same card as the monitor selected by WoW/IS as described above (or, for Windows XP or earlier, the same specific monitor). If you're certain you have the setting set, and the windows right, don't rule out the possibility that the monitors are not in the order you expect them to be in -- this is a common source of frustration.

I seem to have the same problem running 2 instances on the same ATI card (while running 4 instances on a second (older) machine without any problems).

As described above, after switching between windows several times without any problems, the system can "snap" and after that, the frame rate will be at around 4-5fps without any chance of recovery until restarting the EQ2 clients.

EDIT: Changed setup and removed the windows layout (just using two windows and switching with windows window switching). Same thing happened, ended crawlingly slow. I then set down the graphics detail to extremely high performance, but the fps remained at 15. I then quit InnerSpace and reloaded it, fps spiked up to 50.