use same fps to sync characters

I had 30 fps on one window and 15 fps on the other 2 windows. To keep the main character from getting ahead of the other 2, I had to wait for what seemed like a full second after the main character stopped for the other 2 to catch up. Movement speed was the same. The animations of the other 2 running were jerky. It is the same story from any window's perspective: the others seem behind.

Setting 30 fps for all windows fixed it. Now the other characters lag behind only as much as network lag, 130 milliseconds.

[Mahther]

Thanks for sharing that. I figured that out as well a while back but didn't think to post it for everyone else. If someone finds that they can't run all 4 instances at a steady 30 fps, lower them all equally in increments of 5. At 15 fps it feels like you're playing in slow motion but if that is all your computer can handle it's probably your best option until you upgrade your rig.

Before lowering fps settings for the clients in ISboxer I would do everything in my power to remedy the situation in other ways.

A lot of stuff can affect performance such as:

- Game settings - AA, make sure Low FX is set, turn off shadows and ground clutter, and turn down textures and particle effects
- Make sure AA isn't being forced in your graphics settings
- Turn off resource hogs like Windows Aero
- Update gfx card drivers
- Change your CPU options for the Set in ISboxer (I run best letting Windows manage the cores by having ISboxer select all slots with all cores)

Also with ISboxer limiting FPS to 30 for each slot in the game anyway settings in the game like MaxForeground FPS and Vysnc are redundant and having them on has a chance to cause issues. Best to just turn them off in the settings for the boxed clients.

Always make sure to use "Make Window Believe it is the foreground window" or whatever that option is in ISboxer. Though Lax just mentioned the new build of ISboxer sets that by default if you use the Diablo 3 preset in the wizard.

If after checking everything else you are still having issues, then lowering the FPS cap like Mahther mentioned may be your only option. It would be just the last thing I would resort to.

I was curious what type of hardware some of you were using, as well as your screen configurations. My biggest problem is video performance, ad keeping characters synced up. I did not have much time to test over the weekend, but this is what I tried.

All slots set to 1920*1080. I setup slot1 screen on the main monitor 1920*1080 in full screen. Then the other 3 screens on my secondary 1680*1050 monitor. Each monitor is on a separate card. The game settings were all set the same for all slots. Everything was on low, and I turned off what I could. My AA settings in Nvidia control panel were all set to be controlled by game settings.

I have dual GTS 250s that are physically bridged but SLI is not turned on. I was running an instance of GPU-Z for both cards while I tried this and the interesting this was that the average FPS of the 3 screens (with same settings) was higher(mid 20s) than the one main screen(mid teens) window. GPU-Z for the main screen was showing a usage of high 800 MB range for memory usage (out of 1GB) and the load was constantly at 95% or higher. While at the same time on the second monitor, the three other slots were using 350-400 MB and running at 30-40% load.

All of this has got me thinking a lot about upgrading video card(s) for sure and possibly a monitor. So here are a few questions:

-It sounds like a lot of people like running 4 slots on one screen. Have people tried other configurations, or does this seem like the most efficient way to run?
-What type of video cards are you running to support 4 slots on one screen? Or what kind of cards for a multiple screen setup? (hardware forum says that more video RAM is a good thing to have)
-Any ideas why my slot1 game is running so poorly compared to the other 3 slots?

Unfortunately I am at work and do not have the ability to upload my configuration right now. I can later if that would be helpful.

Hi,

In case you find it helpful, used 4 slots, same monitor, single gtx 295 card.
Limiting diablo3 max foreground to 60fps on all slots, remove all details, set low fx, etc, CPU strategy not round robin (that worked worse), used the all for all (not sure what it's called right now), with 60fps/20fps, everything worked fine (30-50fps on active slot, actually playable). Finished the beta with 4 same chars (first wd, then barbs and monk), then with a mixed team (wiz, dh, barb and monk).

It's a 2 and a half years old computer and I was frankly impressed with how responsive slot swapping was and how well everything worked together.

On my first try, I limited diablo 3 max foreground to 15fps on secondary slots and that generated a problem like the one you're describing. Moving the mouse on the main slot generated bigger moves on the secondary slots.

I have 2 gtx 560 ti in SLI, 2 1920 x 1080 monitors, and an i5 2500k overclocked to 4.6 ghz. I have one window at 1920 x 1080 on one monitor and 3 windows at 960 x 540 on the other monitor.

I read that I should use one gpu per monitor instead of sli, but sli is working great for me. I guess recent drivers improved sli for multi-process windowed mode. My gpu usage is low enough that I think I could easily enough quad box Diablo 3 with only one gtx 560 ti with low graphics settings and fps 30 or lower.

CPU usage is keeping me at 3 boxes instead of 4 for now. It is amazing how consistent Diablo 3's cpu usage is (in gameplay, per box), regardless of framerate cap and graphics settings etc. If I force the framerate in half, then I get half the gpu usage and about the same cpu usage. While tri-boxing my cpu usage is 85% average, almost always within 80% - 90%. I checked resource monitor: everything besides Diablo 3 usually uses less than 1%. I do not think I can clock my i5 2500k any higher than 4.6 ghz with my air cooling (1.32 core voltage, 90 degrees with prime95, 80 degrees with tri-box Diablo 3).

Last night I streamed playing from level 1 to skeleton king with 3 demon hunters, then 3 witch doctors, then 3 wizards. At the moment, the 10 most recent videos show that. I streamed at 960 x 540 15 fps, video encoder set to "faster". CPU usage was 95% to 100% the whole time.

http://www.own3d.tv/John_Barron

Thanks for the input! I got a little more time to play around this morning and enabled SLI and messed with a few other settings and got up to the 40s for FPS on my main screen and the syncing issues have become much less of a problem. It is exciting to know I shouldn't have to invest more in GPUs for the time being.

Thank you all for the help!

Those who were able to quad-box, what CPU did you use? Should I have been able to quad-box with my i5 2500k?

[Mahther]

I'm not familiar with intel but I'll share my experience just in case it helps. My CPU is an AMD Phenom II quad core OC to 4GHz, 16 gigs of ram, two HD 5770 in crossfire at stock speeds, with D3 and WIn7 64 installed on separate SSDs.

When I used a 4 corners setup at 1920x1080 there was enough lag to be an annoyance. That was easily fixed by lowering the in-game resolutions on all accounts. There was not a huge difference in graphic quality between the second highest 16:9 resolution (1776x1000) and the lowest 16:9 (1152x648) but there was a big increase in performance at the lowest. The only real issue I had was reading small text which there isn't really a workaround for in that setup, though using an 800x600 resolution slightly helped with that at the cost of some field of view.

I decided that the text issue was not worth the hassle and switched to a two monitor setup, with the master account on the the main screen with an in-game resolution of 1920x1080 and the three slaves in respective corners of the secondary monitor at 1152x648. With this setup I left window switching enabled to swap a slave to the primary monitor to read text as needed. The only issue with this is a sore neck from looking at your secondary monitor to see what dropped after every single kill. I have a feeling that I'm going to invest in a mount to hang my secondary monitor over my primary until I can afford a much larger primary monitor.

I know our setups could be completely different but I hope at least some of this is useful to you.

I was able to get in the 40 fps range on my main screen at 1920x1080 then a bit lower on the 3 other slots on second monitor 1680x1050 with:

Lowest game settings
I7 - 930 - ran at about 80% load
12 Gb ram
dual GTS 250s in SLI - running about 80-90% load
OS and D3 running on SSD
nothing overclocked