[Suggestion] Starting to Lose Hope - Lag Issue

Game: Diablo 3

I really tried to do everything possible, including tweaking my framerate guide, as well as dozens of other performance enhancing processes that LAX has layed out for us in forums and in wikipedia. Also setting fps fore/back ground both 30fps, lowered the resolutions, changed in-game settings, turned off anti aliasing and vertical sync etc, etc, etc. I actually have read a post almost exactly to what my problem is, but his issue was slightly different and had different system specs than I, and unfortunately didnt help.

Heres my experience:
1 box - smooth as butter
2 box - smooth as butter
3 box - often laggy 50% of the time(mainly large mobs/elites), but playable (with slight frustration)
4 box - about the same as 3 box, except one screen fps is always lower than the others, causing the character to go slower than the others, causing constant un-sync and death.
but when im in town, or menus, or an unpopulated part of maps, I operate at full capacity with no lag. which is strange to me.
(there was a point where the 4th box wasnt doing this, and I may have changed something I shouldnt have for that slot)


Here are my system specs:

Toshiba Satellite L775D laptop with windows 7, 64-bit
Running only this (1) monitor
Processor: AMD A6-3400M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, 1.40 Ghz, (4) cores, (4) processors
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6520G
Total Ram: 6GB
Available Ram: 5.48GB usable
Available Virtual Memory: 8.75GB


When I am playing 3 boxes, its not often, but I do get system alerts of too much CPU useage.
When I am playing 4 boxes, its frequent that I get CPU useage message.

"Alert - at least 89% of CPU useage for at least one core"
im guessing this is the thing called the "bottle-neck" which I do have a decent understanding of

Another thing I would like to add is that Ive tried all the different CPU settings in isboxer and havent liked any. most times all my fps on each box is different, causing the cursors to move at different paces, therefore unsyncing my chars.

By given the following information, what is there to do, if anything, that will increase my gameplay even a little?
Also a way to reduce this CPU useage?

Most of all....I would like to know what th best combination is, as far as isboxer CPU settings and game settings etc,
for example:

round robin 30/60 vs. 60/60......or......select all cpu 30/60 vs. 60/60, blah blah blah
and what that setting should be matched up with windowed/windowed full screen/full screen???

i been toying with different combinations and cant figure it out. Pls help!!!

Update:

While multiboxing, I changed my settings to Full screen instead of windowed mode, and also set the resolution to the smallest setting.
It seems barely noticable of a difference, but its a tad bit better.
However, now it says 99% of CPU is being used, instead of the 89% i had before.

[lax]

I'm not sure you're going to improve this for 4 instances without replacing your laptop.

The issue is that you're running out of CPU ("APU") power. The game wants to use more, but you don't HAVE more CPU capacity, and because of this the game runs slower at various times and will be choppy. (This is what makes it a bottleneck; imagine taking a bottle of water or something and just turning it upside down and watching the liquid fall out of it... it's going to come out but there's also big bubbles of air that have to go up to fill in emptied parts of the bottle, stopping the draining for an instant and making it choppy, and clearly if you got rid of this little neck on the bottle, all of that liquid would come out faster and air would go in faster and eliminate this slowness/choppiness problem....)

So.... either a) want to reduce the amount of CPU you're using, or b) increase the amount of CPU power you have. Your CPU can turbo clock from 1.4GHz up to 2.3GHz, so it's possible you could use this feature of your laptop to get some more power. But, it's also going to increase the likelihood of overheating. You can try adjusting your laptop's Power mode, e.g. if it's set to "Battery Saving" or "Entertainment" or "Balanced" etc, set it to "High Performance". These are the only suggestions that come to mind as far as boosting the amount of CPU power you have. If neither of those work, you are going to want to look much closer at reducing your CPU usage.

One way to reduce CPU usage is instead of setting your FPS at 30/30 (particularly if your game windows are not reaching 30 FPS anyway), you want LESS FPS. The point of the FPS Limit, generally, is to reduce the CPU/GPU usage from any given game instance, in order to free it up for other game instances (or when this instance needs it). You can also possibly reduce your CPU usage (and get less FPS) by *enabling* V-Sync. What these changes will potentially do is bring down your AVERAGE CPU/GPU usage, in order to alleviate some of your problems during HIGH CPU/GPU usage. If your average is at 90-99% and then you go into an area with lots of mobs where the game is going to be using much more CPU power (times the number of instances you're running, mind you!) then you're simply not going to have more power to give it at that time, and it's going to lag.

Hopefully this gives you a better understanding...

Thanks for your quick reply lax.

I understand the bottlenecking now after your explaination, thanks.
And yes, I have configured my power settings to high performance and everything else imaginable on the first day, using all your guides.
The thing im not sure of is how to put the turbo on my GHz as you explained above. I looked around and cant find the screen to increase it.
Also, You have greatly cleared up the issue about the fps selection for isboxer cpu. I knew i was supposed to do it, but didnt know the numbers or what it meant.

So basically whatever my fps maximum reaches while in game, is what I should set my fps max in isboxer settings....

However!!
while in menus and in town my fps goes to 25 fps
while in maps it comes down to about 15-20 fps
while battling mobs/elites it comes down to 8-10'ish fps (5-6 at worst times)

So with this being said, which of these should I make my max foreground/background fps? 10, 15, 20 or 25?


The only other 2 things you didnt clear up was
1)the actual CPU strategy selection. (round robin, select al cpu's, etc)
I cant get all the screens to have the same framerate and is very frustrating.
2)in diablo settings, choose windowed full screen? full screen? windowed? what is best for my issues?
Please elaborate on these a little bit and I think I might be a little more on track.

[lax]

The thing im not sure of is how to put the turbo on my GHz as you explained above. I looked around and cant find the screen to increase it.

I don't know either.

So basically whatever my fps maximum reaches while in game, is what I should set my fps max in isboxer settings....

However!!
while in menus and in town my fps goes to 25 fps
while in maps it comes down to about 15-20 fps
while battling mobs/elites it comes down to 8-10'ish fps (5-6 at worst times)

So with this being said, which of these should I make my max foreground/background fps? 10, 15, 20 or 25?

Well, the trick is (in your case) that you want your FPS Limit to reduce your FPS, so setting it even one higher than what you actually get is fairly useless to you. Your benefit comes from whatever reduction in FPS there is at the time. In the menus or in town, when you typically get 25, if it's set to 20 you're expecting to free up about 5 FPS for that instance. In maps where it's typically 15-20, you would expecting little to no benefit from a limit of 20 or 25. In a battle where you'd get 5-10 FPS, you should also be expecting no benefit from a limit of 20 or 25. I will caution you that lowering your FPS limit is not going to improve your worst FPS (what you're really wanting), it's just going to help smooth things out across the instances...

1)the actual CPU strategy selection. (round robin, select al cpu's, etc)
I cant get all the screens to have the same framerate and is very frustrating.

There isn't a solid answer as to what CPU strategy you should pick. It's designed to be easy to change because this is something you can play with and determine if you see an improvement one way or another...

With 4 instances currently maxing out a 4 core CPU, I would not expect a significant difference in the strategies.

Round-robin is going to put one game instance per CPU core, meaning that this particular game instance will attempt to maximize its use of this core and not the others. This is potentially beneficial as the game instances are not having to constantly compete for each of the CPUs. However, in the case where there is extra capacity on one or more of the four, this could also be wasteful. Selecting all CPUs with all windows will be more of an improvement in the case where one or more game instances are using more CPU than others, because they will be able to eat up the extra capacity from the instances that are not working so hard.

2)in diablo settings, choose windowed full screen? full screen? windowed? what is best for my issues?
Please elaborate on these a little bit and I think I might be a little more on track.

I wouldn't expect changing this setting to have a noticeable impact on CPU. As a general rule for Diablo 3, as the sticky post says, Windowed Fullscreen is recommended.

[MiRai]

The thing im not sure of is how to put the turbo on my GHz as you explained above.

CPU "boost" or "turbo" clock speeds are going to be governed by thermals. If the CPU is already running too hot as it is, then you're not going to get any turbo speeds out of it and it'll sit at its stock rated speed. Turbo isn't meant to be a free 24-7 overclock, it's meant as a quick boost to help open up applications faster and other small tasks such as that.