Game booster program

I am slightly new to the "knowing a good amount about computers" scene but I'm learning fast. But I have heard of game boosting programs (essentially shutting down all unnecessary processes plus some other things). What exactly do these programs do, do they work well, and what are the names of some good ones? Preferably free if possible. I'm receiving this laptop in the mail tomorrow:

Newegg.com - ASUS A53 Series A53SV-XN1 Notebook Intel Core i5 2410M(2.30GHz) 15.6" 6GB Memory DDR3 1333 750GB HDD 7200rpm DVD Super Multi NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M

I'm a big gamer, and yes I know I could have gotten something better for gaming but $750 was more than I really could afford. Overall the specs are great for the price anyway. But I'm going to be playing a ton of games on that thing (yes I'm getting a cooling pad, any recommendations?) and I'm going to want the most performance I can get.

I am actually open to talk about anything in this post, so if you don't know of a game boosting program, don't be afraid to speak your mind about my laptop, cooling pads, gaming, etc. Thanks everyone. Btw, I'm new to this forum and I gotta say its awesome

 

Hi and welcome to the forums. So far I haven't seen any proof these kind of 'boosters' works at all. If in theory they work as advertised (shutting down unnecessary programs) they would only help if you are very low on RAM (say 2 GB or less) since all these program do is basically free RAM.

 

I find that hard to believe. A lot of programs and processes that run in the background use more than just RAM. They use the CPU as well. And clearing up both has to give at least somewhat of a performance boost.

 

They really don't. Check the task manager. Shutting down a few processes that together comprise less than 1% cpu usage is not going to change performance in any meaningful way. There are only a handful of processes going in windows 7, and mostly they are "mission critical" anyway and shouldn't be turned off.

You would be better off adjusting settings in the game or adjusting driver settings. Keep your GPU drivers up to date.

 

Oh ok. So game optimization programs are basically a scam... Well thanks then.

 

Hmm, I'm not so sure if they'd be useful for newer laptops (like yours with an i5 and a 540m), but the program "Game Booster" (I know, original name) actually worked pretty well for me. It gave me a few extra FPS in a few games, but then again, I had a terrible CPU. I haven't tried it out yet on my new laptop (i7 2630, gtx 460m), but it did help me with my old one (AMD ZM-82, ATI 3850).

 

Eh, shutting down services won't help much. They pretty much don't hold CPU time and hold tiny amounts of RAM, which isn't an issue at 6GB at all.

Then again, I could be wrong. I don't know if it does anything else.

 

A true game optimization program would have to optimize the machine code of the game, which is doable. But then pretty much every EULA forbids reverse engineering of their software, so don't hold your breath.

You can get free profilers that shows overall cpu usage and see which processes are using the cpu and how much
http://developer.amd.com/tools/CodeAnalyst/PublishingImages/matrix_omp_graph.jpg over a period of time. Whatever you see in task manager as 0% may or not build up to a few %

 

From what I've seen, Game Booster works, but you'll only really notice a difference on a computer that struggles to run games as it is. My friend plays LoL, TF2 and WoW on a laptop with an old C2D processor, 2GB memory and Intel integrated graphics. He would usually get around 10 fps in any of these. He tried Game Booster, and he now gets closer to 20 most of the time, although it still dips.

I don't think it would make any tangible difference at all on a capable computer like yours, though.

 

Game boosters are an absolute joke. They're for people who download and install everything they see, it disables some stuff that they don't need. Honestly if you open a game and it lags and you aren't doing anything you shouldn't be at the same time, then nothing is going to make that game play better. On a desktop you can squeeze some extra power out but laptops are basically 'locked' they can do what they can do and they cant what they cant.

As for your card, watch yourself. My GT 540M just died after exactly 5 months to the day I bought it. Not saying it's a bad card but it isn't all that impressive either. Overheats like hell playing WoW on max. Was getting temps of 85C even got up to 89C at one point. I really hope you get a good cooler.

The laptop pulls air in from the bottom. I got a coolermaster U3 it's huge and works amazingly. Most coolers these days suck and are an absolute joke and waste of money. The U3 lets you place the fans at the hottest points of your computer. I had 4 so I got the U3 and then an extra fan from Ebay. Worked brilliantly. Though those temperatures were WITH the cooler on. I'd dare say the laptop would have shut down to prevent damage if I didn't have that cooler. The cooler really helps cool your laptop down quickly when you exit the game, and you suddenly don't need the power. But whilst playing it'll probably only do a max of -5, -6C which is still a lot seeing as many other coolers cant even do that. I spent weeks reading all the other reviews here about coolers and I have to say that I don't like, or trust any of the other reviews on coolers here. They are all incredibly outdated and bias towards the coolers that the people bought themselves. (Everyone likes to think they got the best thing).

For me the U3 was a no brainer. Just don't expect magic out of that card. I was lucky enough to score a DDR5 version and it wasn't all that impressed.

The biggest piece of advice I can give you is defrag all your game files to the outer areas of your disk. Those are the most fastest. Or use an SSD of course. On top of that, only install what you need. Really, you don't need to install junk so just run what you need. More clutter = Less speed. Don't expect to play ANY 2011 games on that laptop. No 'Dead Island' and no 'Metro 2033' even.

 

The machine code is already optimised by the compiler. I really doubt that the small team this program probably has behind it could write a better optimising algorithm than who wrote the compiler (quite likely intel, loads of people use the intel compiler). Also, in trying to opimise the machine code, you'd be chewing through CPU time doing it and so probably making it run worse.

That would only make your loading screens a little quicker, the game its self would run the same.

 

Depends what compiler they're using.

 

Any mainstream compiler would do a better job of optimising code than a small program running in real time. Even supposing you did manage to optimise a small section, the amount of resources that would take would vastly excede the gain you'd get.

And all of this is assuming they used a bad compiler and write poor source code in the first place (and I mean poor, as in when I raged at my game of life program and put a try/except in four nested for loops because I couldn't be bothered to fiddle with the edges of the array at the time).

 

Not in real time, it should rewrite the executable once.

 

dont be hatin on c2d lol. my d820 2ghz c2d with 2gb ram and a 7400 go, could play bf2 with all the settings maxed at 35fps!

 

Yeah, well, BF2 was released in, what, 2005? And it never really had mind-blowing graphics to begin with, even for its time.

 

lol my laptop was made in 2006 so its kindof like me playing bfbc2 on my malibal now. anyways i used to do that trick where you set the settings to ultra/4 instead of 3, but they disabled that for some reason.

 

I had a similar experience on my EEEPC 1201N, I ran the gamebooster and actually got slightly smoother gameplay on Fallout 3. I still had to keep all the settings on low however, and it didn't make enough of a difference to make it more playable.

 

I don't mean to be offensively blunt, but you don't understand how executable programs work on a modern operating system.

What you are suggesting simply does not exist, for so many reasons.

1. The executable files for modern games are very small programs that simply call upon other code and other resources. Rewriting the executable to optimize the code that basically just says "Hey, I started. Launching program. Wait until program is done. Now I'm done." What kind of performance gains do you think you will get with any optimizations you could do to this program? Exactly.

2. Small groups with less resources than the game developers and without access to the source code have no chance of reverse engineering extra performance out of a large application like a game. The game developers have a vested interest in getting the best performance as is possible from their application.

Come back for 3,4,5...100 if you aren't satisfied.

 

Firstly congrats on the new system, the specs look good for the price and you should not worry too much.

The one thing you could do is use a program like GPU-Z to monitor your GPU temperatures in your most stressful games and see if you have some headroom to overclock your GPU which would result in real performance gains.

Overclocking programs include MSI afterburner and Nvidia inspector.

However do just double check with people that your temperatures are fine as overclocking does make your GPU run hotter.

 

Go back to coding java. Thanks.

 

Have you never wondered what the vast amount of dll files in games are there for?

 

Have you ever wondered that if a program can rewrite an exe it could also have functionality to rewrite a dll?

 

I don't see how a blanket program can do better than the instruction re-ordering built into the CPU and compilers produced by intel....

 

Actually it depends on the game. Games like Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion WILL run smoother on an SSD rather than on a 5400RPM hard drive because of how the game constantly loads files from the hard drive. Especially in outer areas of the games.

 

Although that is possible, there are an awful lot of them for the game engine and it would take a fair amount of time. Saying that it's possible to re-write a dll is besides the point anyway given that we all know (you included) that game optimisers don't do that and would probably make the game run worse if they tried.

If guess that if it's stream loading then it could make a difference.

 

This simply doesn't exist. You are describing elaborate reverse engineering. The problem is that even when you reverse engineer the executable, then what? You're still no better off than the developer was in the first place. Any optimization you could make with your budget, they could have also made, and their budget is higher, and they didn't invest any of their budget on reverse engineering their own software.

Furthermore, AAA game companies are leveraging compiler tools that have large corporations (Intel) behind them with teams of well paid, full time researchers seeking out as much performance optimization as possible. These scientists are working with the other researchers and scientists who designed the hardware.

What kind of machine code optimizations do you know about that they don't?

You're being entirely unreasonable. Show me any body of work where there exists a compiler intended to provide a performance benefit where the input is pre-compiled code. Failure.

 

lol Key001 is correct, that's how compiling works. Duh.

Anyway it's completely unreasonable (and impossible?) to recompile it, I'm not sure why that's even being brought up. I doubt these "game boosters" do anything like that.

 

Some of these were written by 1 person without any budget. Debugger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The complexity of a debugger is decades ahead some mediocre fps that you play for 4 hours to finish it.

This is some code from a very popular AAA title that is starving the pipeline It can be rewritten by hand to run ~3 times faster and it will be of the same length or less so that the functions don't have to be expanded. An algorithm can be made to do that automatically.

Code:

		        mov     edx, [esp+8]
			fld     dword ptr [ecx]
			fmul    dword ptr [edx]
			mov     eax, [esp+4]
			fld     dword ptr [edx+4]
			fmul    dword ptr [ecx+4]
			faddp   st(1), st
			fld     dword ptr [ecx+8]
			fmul    dword ptr [edx+8]
			faddp   st(1), st
			fstp    dword ptr [eax]
			fld     dword ptr [ecx+0x0c]
			fmul    dword ptr [edx]
			fld     dword ptr [ecx+0x10]
			fmul    dword ptr [edx+4]
			faddp   st(1), st
			fld     dword ptr [ecx+0x14]
			fmul    dword ptr [edx+8]
			faddp   st(1), st
			fstp    dword ptr [eax+4]
			fld     dword ptr [ecx+0x18]
			fmul    dword ptr [edx]
			fld     dword ptr [ecx+0x1c]
			fmul    dword ptr [edx+4]
			faddp   st(1), st
			fld     dword ptr [ecx+0x20]
			fmul    dword ptr [edx+8]
			faddp   st(1), st
			fstp    dword ptr [eax+8]

I don't know whether such an automated tool exists yet. VTune is used manually to optimize the code produced by the compiler.

Now, why would anyone in their mind use VTune if the omnipotent compiler already optimizes the code for you?

 

How much does the GPU drivers or the CPU do the same reordering internally though?

 

Game booster programs work for laptops out of the box that come loaded with bloatware. I recommend a clean install of the operating system anyways to get rid of everything and this 99% of the time will bring your computer up to maximum performance.


With all the ram that comes installed now days as long as your drivers are up to date you don't have to worry about extra tasks running.