Process Tamer

I got a simple/noobish question about this software. I got it from here
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html

It's a pretty cool software that tells the computer what to run on high priority, like games. I want all my games to get the most fps they can get from my comp. As of now i have them set to "force high" but is putting "force realtime" a better choice? Meaning...is it higher than "high?"

 

Putting realtime on processes could be very unstable. I found when trying this, the 'network lag' type of feel comes up, in single player. This is just overworking your CPU with the realtime load. Leave it on high at max, in fact, when playing Oblivion, just leave it on normal and look up a tweaking guide. Sometimes this can increase framerates by a small ratio, but really, lag, unresponsiveness and freezing/crashing isn't worth it.

Cheers

 

Realtime is usually evil. It doesn't "overwork" your CPU, it just ensures that no other process is run. At all.

That's a bad idea, because some of the other processes are typically pretty vital to running your computer.

Also, changing priority doesn't make your CPU magically work faster. It is only used by Windows to decide when to execute each running process. But when playing a game, your process is typically the only one that's taking more than 0.5% CPU, so it doesn't really make a difference in any case. Most of the time, your game will have small stalls where it can't run (waiting for HDD data, or waiting for GPU to synchronize with the GPU), and then all the other processes are run in that time.

If the game has no such stalls, then yes, you mgiht gain ~0.5% performance by changing priority from normal to high. But only, and this is important, by taking CPU time away from other processes. So if you want to run Winamp in the background, you're screwed. If you receive a message on MSN or an email, the OS will be hard pressed to find time to handle it.

All that, just to go from 50.0 to 50.2 FPS... Is that worth it?

 

Yea, Jalf is right. It doesnt overwork my Core 2 Duo, but it killed my old p4 1.8ghz. Don't bother. I used to get 2 extra frames on CoD, and then again, I wasn't responding properly. The hardest part was to switch back into the game.