Window Media Player= Huge fps increase?

[Deleted]

Learned something new again! On mobile platforms, aka. laptop, to increase battery life by up to 25%, says the document from Microsoft on timer resolution, the default resolution can be lowered to save CPU cycles. Some programs can increase it from the default 15 something odd milliseconds to 1 millisecond. Find it odd that the improvement would be quite that dramatic and isn't plastered all over the wall. Would think this could also be bypassed by switching from the power saving mode probably selected by default on a laptop to a higher setting? The .doc I found was particular to Win7.

[ayako]

From what I was reading on it its already automatically managed, also flash has been tweaked to revert the timer when a video is paused/backgrounded/not playing.

Windows uses a system timer to determine the orchestration of the routines that must be executed on the system. When the timer is set to a high resolution - for example, with video playback where precise timing and performance is critical - the system can update the screen very frequently. However, this kind of timer setting also uses more energy. Flash Player now also ensures that the system timer resolution reverts back to the system default if a video is paused, or ends, or is placed in a background tab. Allowing Windows to use the default timer resolution whenever possible reduces power use and saves energy (a particular benefit for PCs running on battery power). Flash Player only adjusts the system timer to its maximum resolution when actively rendering video, which ensures both smooth rendering and greater energy efficiency for PCs.

Finally, if a video is rendering in a background tab, Flash Player 10.1 drops the video frame rate down to two frames per second. This function helps save power, and improves the performance of Windows PCs when running computationally-intensive applications for Flash Player in the background.

[Twilightdawn]

As far as i know, WMP = 1-2 FPS increase, and only because of how it redirects GPU, but i know that some people found that rift would run at 9 fps on low settings and 30 at ultra, kind of unrelated though

[Deleted]

Well, it'd be about time Adobe fixed the issue, will have to test as Flash was just recently updated what with that security vulnerability and all.
Either way, at least before this Flash update the case used to be this.

To sum it up: Getting low FPS in WoW with a YouTube video open? Disable Flash hardware acceleration.
Which was exactly the case for me.

[ayako]

I think it greatly depends on the graphics card. I often play a few videos while I play WoW while encoding videos and don't notice any drops. I also have DXVA or Hardware Acceleration on.

[Deleted]

I had a hard time figuring out what it was as well, but it turns out that as some of the videos are h.264 they don't have HW acceleration support for Flash. Friend with the HD6970 also cursed over FPS drops with youtube vids running while WoW was on only just recently as he got the card. But he also had figured it out before I finally remembered to mention about it to him.

[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

Since people missed it first time around I'm quoting myself.

Blizzard added years ago an option to WoW for setting the timing method manually out of few alternatives. It should do the same as any "run WMP in the background" tricks without actually running WMP on the background.