Using VFX makes my FPS plummet - any suggestions?

[Tonzz2000]

So im working on a setup that, ideally have 12 VFX from 12 clients. Atleast. with running 1 or less VFX i get 55 Limited FPS across all clients in both idle and busy playing. But as soon as i add 6+ i go down 10 fps and even more when screen gets busy, and even more with 12 clients.

Im running an AMD 8350 and a 970 graphic card on a SSD with 16gb of ram. I suspect that i shouldnt be hitching this much with VFX.

So maybe i did something wrong in the CPU strategy or god knows what. Im not expert in this unfortunately. So any insight is more than welcome.

[bob]

So, first things, if this was discussed in RIC yesterday, MiRai had a look at your profile and said the CPU affinity was all a bit funny, so I'd suggest running the CPU Strategy Wizard and selecting the last option in the drop down, which is something like Select All Cores for All Windows (there may be multiple options like this, just select the last item in the drop down). Also check the FPS settings for foreground/background while your at it.

After that, if you still have issues, do some monitoring of your hardware, so you can see if it is peaking on something..

[Tonzz2000]

This was discussed yesterday, as i brought it up. Apologize for making a thread about it as well. But between feeding a 6 months old and making sure she's entertained, some info might slip by me, or forget it completely.


I tried the last one just now, and it seemed to have given me a few more FPS, up to 32 - 34. But its going steadyish under normal load.

What precisely am i checking in the back-/foreground FPS settings? They are set to 60/30 by default

[Tonzz2000]

added the file from the monitor. Looks like all the CPU's are maxing out for some reason

[bob]

You might have disconnected when it was mentioned so I figured it had passed you by. Sometimes well discuss things further and wait for you to come back .

Anyway, the foreground/background settings were purely so you can set something which wont be overwhelming your graphics card (you only have a limited number of FPS, and you are trying to share them 12 ways). You will only know if this is the case based on monitoring the hardware, but, if you got some improvement from changing the strategy, then I'd guess it is CPU bound, and this might just be a side effect for the number of source windows that need to be synchronised.


As I understand it, this is what is providing the VideoFX functionality, so if you are technically minded you can read all about it.
This section I think is where the more source surfaces (windows rather than actual videofx sources) will slow down videofx..

Direct3D 9Ex Shared Surfaces Plus Manual Synchronization Helper

The most fundamental task in Direct3D 9Ex and Direct3D 10 or 11 interoperability is passing a single surface from the first device (device A) to the second (device B) such that when device B acquires a handle on the surface, device A's rendering is guaranteed to have completed. Therefore, device B can use this surface without worry. This is very similar to the classic producer-consumer problem and this discussion models the problem that way. The first device that uses the surface and then relinquishes it is the producer (Device A), and the device that is initially waiting is the consumer (Device B). Any real-world application is more sophisticated than this, and will chain together multiple producer-consumer building blocks to create the desired functionality.

Of course I could be talking out my arse on this as I don't really know how Lax implemented videofx (he said it uses the Windows DWM API, but I think underneath it, the DWM will be using DXGI), and if he refutes my theory then I reserve the right to edit my post accordingly and remove any stupid statements.

edit: I see you found it is CPU bound as I typed this up... time for an upgrade perhaps? Intel CPU's are considered more powerful when it comes to gaming, unfortunately they are also more expensive, and doubly so when you need to change the platform under it.

[Tonzz2000]

Thanks alot Bob

just sucks... its not even that old