Thread: DOS Games

  1. #16
    Woof, woof! zacs7's Avatar
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    Although it wouldn't reduce CPU usage, is it wise to clamp the graphics frames and do thinking as fast as possible?

    Or let them both run at the same rate? At the moment my 'thinking' is unlimited (delta time is used) -- but I limit the rendering FPS to say 100. The rendering doesn't do anything time based though.

  2. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bubba View Post
    There is no problem with 100%. Games take over the system as they should. Hence the whole concept of full screen is to immerse the player in the game. They could care less about IMs, Word, or anything else running in the background.

    Games take 100%. Sleeping is absurd. The reason there isn't a rush to correct this 'problem' is because it is not viewed as a problem. All of my modern games push my CPU usage to 100%.
    What about programs such as Fraps that record the screen? Would 100% cpu usage affect this?

  3. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bubba View Post
    There is no problem with 100%. Games take over the system as they should. Hence the whole concept of full screen is to immerse the player in the game. They could care less about IMs, Word, or anything else running in the background.

    Games take 100%. Sleeping is absurd. The reason there isn't a rush to correct this 'problem' is because it is not viewed as a problem. All of my modern games push my CPU usage to 100%.
    What is absurd is that they eat 100% CPU.
    No, we mostly don't care about the background processes, but we DO care about the electric bill and there's where the problem lies.
    They don't have to eat 100% CPU to immense the player in a wonderful experience.
    Use as much as they need, and no more.
    Quote Originally Posted by Adak View Post
    io.h certainly IS included in some modern compilers. It is no longer part of the standard for C, but it is nevertheless, included in the very latest Pelles C versions.
    Quote Originally Posted by Salem View Post
    You mean it's included as a crutch to help ancient programmers limp along without them having to relearn too much.

    Outside of your DOS world, your header file is meaningless.

  4. #19
    Registered User guesst's Avatar
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    You know, I have an old mode 13h game somewhere around. Maybe I'll post the code, but I seem to remember it using interupts for it's input and screen redraw so that it spent quite a bit of time doing nothing. Unfortunately interupts are no loger a viable resource, which is too bad. I really miss them.

    Funny, my tetris game recently got commented on that it used 100% of the CPU and I took that to be a bad thing trying to think how I could fix it. (It was because the system was looping the input check while waiting for the timed drop.) Turns out it's not a problem, eh? Groovy. I wasn't going to do anything about it anyways.
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  5. #20
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    No, you should listen to feedback. It is a problem, if you ask me.
    Quote Originally Posted by Adak View Post
    io.h certainly IS included in some modern compilers. It is no longer part of the standard for C, but it is nevertheless, included in the very latest Pelles C versions.
    Quote Originally Posted by Salem View Post
    You mean it's included as a crutch to help ancient programmers limp along without them having to relearn too much.

    Outside of your DOS world, your header file is meaningless.

  6. #21
    Woof, woof! zacs7's Avatar
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    Nothing wrong with 100% CPU usage for a game IMO. The faster it runs the less you have to interpolate between frames (thus, theoretically -- smoother play).

  7. #22
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    What is absurd is that they eat 100% CPU.
    No, we mostly don't care about the background processes, but we DO care about the electric bill and there's where the problem lies.
    They don't have to eat 100% CPU to immense the player in a wonderful experience.
    Use as much as they need, and no more.
    You want the game running as fast as possible, rendering as fast as possible, processing as fast as possible, using as much memory as is available, eating as much video memory as the card has. Simple: You want to max out the resources available to your game. And when I say max out I mean 100% completely max them out. Games like Oblivion, Doom 3, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Spore, Sims2, and tons of others need every ounce of every resource the computer has to offer. If the computer has 3 gig, use it, if it has 6 gig, use it. Of course there is a buffer zone so the system doesn't run out of memory but most games will attempt to use everything they can.

    There is nothing wrong with multi-threading the app to gain performance and newer games are using this but I assure you it is not with the intent of bringing the CPU usage down. I don't think the gamers would be happy if their game slowed down just b/c the devs wanted to bring the CPU usage down so they added some sleeps.
    Gamers pay good money for their hardware and the latest and greatest game ought to use every piece of it.

    Some forums say that CPU usage on single core CPUs is always gonna be at 100% on games. Others say this shouldn't happen but give no valid 'graphics related' reasons why. Most of the game physics are being done on the CPU unless you have an Ageia PhysX card. If the game is not heavy on physics and is using a lot of shaders then I could see single core CPU usages below 100%. Personally I do not see the issue with 100% usage and I'm not even sure I would completely trust Microsoft's little CPU gauge as being accurate. There is a lot more going on in the background if you have other apps running in the systray. So even though the gauge shows 100% you really need to look at the details and see which apps are taking the most. Most of the time in a Windows app is spent in idle processing. Most of the time in a game is spent in the update/render loop. This could account for the 100% since this loop is running 60 to 100 times per second or more depending on v-sync settings. This could ramp CPU usage up but this does not mean you are overtaxing it by any means. If you figure there are 200 objects to update 60 to 100 times per second then you are doing 12000 to 20000 updates per second. Depending on the game and how they update objects this could result in a matrix multiply to get to world space right on the CPU or perhaps it is on the GPU. There are still a lot of software algos under the hood that make the game run super fast. Hardware is great but software algos still determine what to draw and what not to draw for the most part. The limiting factor here is the bus since you can't just throw millions of vertices across the bus and expect to get good performance. You also cannot expect to just brute force your way onto the screen by sending everything you have to the card and let it cull what isn't visible. Games still require a significant amount of CPU to cull away objects that do not need to be rendered or processed.


    I'm not sure you can get all of that below 100%. With DirectX10 and mesh instancing and geometry shaders I'm sure we will see these usage numbers drop significantly.
    Last edited by VirtualAce; 05-30-2008 at 07:26 PM.

  8. #23
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    I do agree with you, Bubba. The point was if there is any available resources left - spent doing unnecessary things, then it can be optimized as to not use all 100%.
    Some games are smart enough to pause everything if you tab out. I like that too. I like tabs where it is possible to tab out, too.
    If there's a possibility of getting below 100% while still retaining smooth performance - do it!
    Quote Originally Posted by Adak View Post
    io.h certainly IS included in some modern compilers. It is no longer part of the standard for C, but it is nevertheless, included in the very latest Pelles C versions.
    Quote Originally Posted by Salem View Post
    You mean it's included as a crutch to help ancient programmers limp along without them having to relearn too much.

    Outside of your DOS world, your header file is meaningless.

  9. #24
    Dr Dipshi++ mike_g's Avatar
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    Ok, theres one thing I don't quite get. If say you cap your frame rate at 60-100fps, then if the computer needs to use 100% of its time running the game at that speed then it will. However, if it doesent then it wont end up using more resources than it needs to whilst appearing the same. The only situation where I could see this causing any loss of performance would be if there is a huge variance between loop times (which I guess could occur if you run some of the more demanding thing once every x loops). Maybe I'm missing something here as I guess most new games don't tend to do this
    Last edited by mike_g; 05-31-2008 at 08:47 AM.

  10. #25
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    I don't even think mode 13h has such a straightforward relation to frame rates.

    I always thought any speed control done during the time mode 13h was a common place was by CPU speed calculation. The game would then run at the same speed on any computer. I simply don't remember how they would do it exactly, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't by frame rate clamping. They would probably interfere with the APIC or the Real Time Clock.

    I'm not sure this is possible to do anymore since current windows versions lack a DOS mode.

    My real suggestion here is to not programmatically reduce mode 13h game through FPS reducing. As shown this forces the CPU into more work than it should. Instead, code it in DOS using the methods of the time, then run it under DOSBox, or code it normally in windows and run it with slowdown tools like Mo'Slo.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  11. #26
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bubba View Post
    You want the game running as fast as possible, rendering as fast as possible, processing as fast as possible, using as much memory as is available, eating as much video memory as the card has. Simple: You want to max out the resources available to your game. And when I say max out I mean 100% completely max them out. Games like Oblivion, Doom 3, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Spore, Sims2, and tons of others need every ounce of every resource the computer has to offer. If the computer has 3 gig, use it, if it has 6 gig, use it. Of course there is a buffer zone so the system doesn't run out of memory but most games will attempt to use everything they can.
    the games you mention are big commercial titles. The other dude is talking about a tetris he made. Absolutely no need to go 100% with tetris

  12. #27
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Closed. Please don't bump old threads.

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