CPU 100%

I box Everquest and run 16 copies of the game simultaneously from my SSD. During intense activity some characters will freeze and fall behind, sometimes executing mouse/keyboard commands seconds to minutes after they occur.

I've been running HWinfo064 and watching my CPU/GPU use on my Windows 7 64 bit system.

In brief, with 16 clients running on my 4 cores of an Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD BX80637I53570K overclocked to 4.2 ghz hit 100% across the board at times. The video card,XFX Double D FX-785A-CDFC Radeon HD 7850 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 hits a max of 77%. Physical memory hits max use at 44%. This suggests to me a CPU bottleneck.

Of course I have configured EQ to use as little GPU loads as possible, including cutting way back on rendering of characters running in background. I use IsBoxer to balance use of the 4 cores on the i5. I've tried every combination on the cpu wizard. I seem to get best results with putting my main on cpu core 3 and then letting all the rest of the characters be assigned by windows to cores 1,2 or 4.

If someone out there has hyper-threading and ideally an i5 and an i7, I'd appreciate their use experience when boxing.

If the cpu is the bottleneck is a higher end i7 the way to go? Or would it be better to simply run a second computer and split the boxing load?

[lax]

An i5 doesn't have the hyperthreading that an i7 does, and it is a fairly significant difference when multiboxing. Your 4 cores at 4.2GHz effectively become 1.050GHz per instance; with the same thing hyperthreaded, you'd be looking at effectively twice that per instance (2.1GHz).

You can of course use EQPlayNice's Rendering Limiting feature to drastically reduce the GPU and CPU usage of background EQ1 instances. To get this feature just grab WinEQ 2 from lavishsoft.com and let it run in the system tray. EQPlayNice will then be active in any EQ1 instance. The drawback is that what the Rendering Limiting feature does is prevent the game world from rendering in every frame, which leaves you with a flickering effect on the background windows. However, it does allow for higher effective framerate since there's much lower usage per instance to go around, so if you're getting 20fps per instance now, you might actually get 50+ fps per instance using EQPN rendering limiting due to each frame going much quicker (because rendering the game world takes a lot of time).

I'm wondering how much ISBoxer makes use of hyper-threading. I know on the CPU wizard there is a hyper-threading option. Does that do something like put each new game instance on a different thread?

Thansk

[firescue17]

Yes. The core assignments can be viewed and manually assigned by clicking on the Performance tab of a particular Character Set Slot.

[lax]

I'm wondering how much ISBoxer makes use of hyper-threading. I know on the CPU wizard there is a hyper-threading option. Does that do something like put each new game instance on a different thread?

Thansk

No. Specifically what this option does is double up the CPU cores per game instance, to take maximum advantage of hyper-threading. HT works best when a logical (fake) core is paired with a physical (real) core, since the logical core cannot process all instructions.