Window Media Player= Huge fps increase?

[trickster0306]

Its very strange, but the other day i had windows media player open while playing wow, and i turned my setting up to almost all ultra, and i ran at 40 fps, normally i can barely run at 20 with lower settings, anyone know why this happens?

[Koen]

No clue. I always ran WoW with media player on and couldn't play with everything on Ultra. I also never noted a fps increase or decrease when running without Windows Media Player.

[trickster0306]

No clue. I always ran WoW with media player on and couldn't play with everything on Ultra. I also never noted a fps increase or decrease when running without Windows Media Player.

the only thing i didnt have on ultra was the water and shadow quality, but still with everything on good i barely run at 20 as i said before, and i have a pretty lame computer when it comes to gaming

[ispano]

http://forums.srcds.com/viewtopic/1094

It shouldn't really do anything anymore, but that's been around for a LONG time.

[Deleted]

Yeah isnt this old stuff? Didnt know it still worked....

[vesseblah]

It should've been fixed long ago.

Anyway, here's bit more official information on the multicore timing tweaks regarding WoW
http://www.wowpedia.org/CVar_timingMethod

[Merrena]

It seems to be working the same for me, i turned my view distance all the way up and seem to be doing better than normal

[Koen]

the only thing i didnt have on ultra was the water and shadow quality, but still with everything on good i barely run at 20 as i said before, and i have a pretty lame computer when it comes to gaming

Ah then it is exactly the same. Those are the only two things I never put on Ultra either, I always put Shadow quality at good and water at fair.

Still my point stands, I never noticed this fps increase. I do however, have occasional fps increases to a stable 60 for weeks and then to ~10/15 for weeks. I never figured out what caused these massive peaks in my fps.

[trickster0306]

Ah then it is exactly the same. Those are the only two things I never put on Ultra either, I always put Shadow quality at good and water at fair.

Still my point stands, I never noticed this fps increase. I do however, have occasional fps increases to a stable 60 for weeks and then to ~10/15 for weeks. I never figured out what caused these massive peaks in my fps.

could be your internet?

[ispano]

Your network connection doesn't affect your FPS. You could lag out with 5000ms and be doing so at 100fps

[ayako]

Is your media player disabling Aero? Whats your OS?

[babyback]

I remember using that for playing counter-strike several years ago. Didnt know that stuff worked anymore

[Deleted]

If you have a web browser open with a hardware accelerated flash video or flash based website open, it tends to reserve a portion of GPU clock cycles even when not being played or used. An annyoing issue marketed as a feature, but can be averted with disabling the HW acceleration in the flash options. What likely happens if this is the case, is that media player overrides whatever priorities flash player takes and FPS more or less returns to normal instead of being increased. Just a thought as it took a while for me to figure out and was causing annoying FPS drops, especially in WoW as I often have at least a couple youtube vids in the background on the browser.

[ayako]

I remember using that for playing counter-strike several years ago. Didnt know that stuff worked anymore

It was mostly for hosting games, not for playing them, playing developer mode for more than 100 fps did wonky things on the HL1 engine. I used to use flash to help me run several 1000 tickrate cs 1.6 servers back in the day (on the non linux hlds servers).

[trickster0306]

Is your media player disabling Aero? Whats your OS?

im using windows 7 64bit

[ayako]

Does running Media Player disable your Aero?

[trickster0306]

Does running Media Player disable your Aero?

not really sure what do you mean aero, im not very good at the actual technical stuff when it comes to comps

[Kait]

Windows Media Player increases the Windows Kernel Timer Resolution. So does any random flash applet. This was used alot on Windows HLDS servers. I never thought this would still work on clients running WoW with W7...

[trickster0306]

i did have a youtube video running in the background, do you think it could be that?

[ayako]

not really sure what do you mean aero, im not very good at the actual technical stuff when it comes to comps

Do your Windows keep transparency?

Windows Media Player increases the Windows Kernel Timer Resolution. So does any random flash applet. This was used alot on Windows HLDS servers. I never thought this would still work on clients running WoW with W7...

Windows XP had a 10 second millisecond timer, and Windows 7 is already 1 millisecond by default I believe.

i did have a youtube video running in the background, do you think it could be that?

Flash OR WMP should do the same thing so you wouldn't need to have both running to see the effect. Another thing is I guess your GPU clocking could be buggy and only having Hardware Acceleration is making it clock up. Download GPU-Z and check the clocks when you launch your game.