Duel core amd's and torque

#21 I have dual core amd 4400 with two 7800gtx's in SLI and don't have any problems like this.

#22 In TSE or TGE/TLK?

#23 I am curious to see how Vista is gonna handle this issue....

#24 Not much longer to wait, after this January I'll be picking up a copy of Vista at my school's bookstore (so the bookstore says)

I'm going to try the profiler this weekend and see what I can do because when that problem shows up, TGE runs like tar on my box, AMD 3800 dual core with 1gb of super low latency ram and two 7800 gt's in SLI and sata2 drives... I mean c'mon Oblivion, Fear, and Halflife 2 run like a dream with the settings cranked TGE should be smokin! I can't see using a fix that will make multiplayer sessions crash, my game plan includes single/ and multiplayer, a BIG reason why I switched to torque was its networking. I bought TSE and it seems to run pretty well especially considering I'm just running a milestone build, but I'm trying to guestimate how many people have dished out major bucks for their pc's I know quite a few people that grumble about spending more than $50 for a video card.

#25 Often dual core processors arent as good as normal.

#26 To the point... If anyone finds a way to better support these processors in TGE, please share.

But maybe in 1.5 we'll see an improvement :) ?

#27 If those of you who are having problems with your dual core setup could post your system specs, it could help us narrow down the issue. Is it a 64 bit processor issue? Does it happen more frequenly with less RAM?

#28 No and no - It happens on any daul-core or Hyperthreading/Hypertransport PC's. (I might be wrong but this is what I have seen - NOTE: Sometimes you don't get a lag effect, sometimes you do) It even happens on my P4 (single core) but with Hyperthreading (because it acts like 2 cores).

System Specs-
PC 1:
AMD x2 x64 4400+
2GB PC3200 RAM
Windows XP x64 Pro

PC 2:
P4 2.6ghz HT
1GB PC3200 RAM
Windows XP Home

#29 CPU: AMD Athlon-64 x2 4400+ (with Hyper Transport Technology yadda yadda)
Mainboard: eVGA nForce-4 SLI Chipset Dual DDR w/7.1 Sound, Gb LAN, S-ATA Raid, USB 2.0, Dual PCI-E MB
Video: Two SLI-linked Nvidia Geforce 7900GT's w/ 256MB each
RAM: 1 GB [512MB X2] DDR-400 PC3200
Operating System: Windows XP Media Center Edition

The frequency and degree of problem seems dependent upon the game. I can run TGB just fine in edit / creation mode, but making a stand-alone game resulted in a framerate of about 2 frames per second. I played another TGB game that seemed to run just fine. A couple of Torque demos I tried seemed to be hammered for framerate for about the first ten seconds, and then began running normally. Many TGE demos end up running either extremely fast or extremely slow.

No problems were experienced on non-64-bit, non-dual-core CPUs with between 512 and 768 MB RAM.

#30 I have never heard of a single core intel p4 HT cpu having to run a torque or tse game for 2-3 minutes to "settle fps".

Something else going on here... if that was true GG staff would of ran into it a Loong time ago.

What about other games like Battlefield 2. If that loads smoooth maybe somethings wrong. If it loads choppy too it's your pc.

#31 CPU: AMD Athlon-64 x2 3800
Mainboard: Asus a8n32 deluxe
Video: Two SLI-linked XFX Nvidia Geforce 7800GT's w/ 256MB each
RAM: 1 GB [512MB X2] DDR-400 PC3200 dual channel
HD: two Western Digital 250gb Sata 2, Not in RAID config
Operating System: Windows XP Pro 32-bit

torque products I own and have seen this issue in: TGE 1.4 and TLK+TGE

I'll second that sometimes it seems to happen in the first few seconds and then smooth out, or in some builds it seems to be a constant effect of bad performance (slow control response, slow framerate)

And it does actually seem to run better on my celeron 2.2ghz, 768Mb of ram, IDE drives, xp pro 32, geforce 440 lx video

Edit: Other 3d aps run fine on both of these pc's, not so well on the celeron with the 440lx video card but go figure...

#32 Interesting thread.

does anyone have a take on whether this affects windows boxes only,
or might one run into it w/ dedicated TGE servers on linux boxes as well ?

out of curiosity, has anybody seen these issues w/ dedicated servers on windows ?
(ie sans rendering)

edit: Josh, re the "really weird issues" w/ your servers, i'm looking at timeBeginPeriod() and it looks pretty windows-specific, so i'm guessing these are windows boxes ? At some point i'd love to hear how you've felt about that vs. linux servers. We're strictly linux on the server-side. It's a bit of a hassle during development but by and large i think it's working out well if only for the admin/deployment type tools available there.

#33 @Randy:
Nope, never experienced a single problem with any other 3D App. It's a problem unique to Torque for some reason.

#34

Quote:It happens on any daul-core or Hyperthreading/Hypertransport PC's

I find that hard to believe. The timing problem we're talking about happens only on dual core systems where both cores do power management independently, so the timing jitters out of sync on each of the cores.

Hyperthreaded systems use the same core for both threads, so timing can't get out of sync.

Traditional (last generation) dual-CPU systems also don't do power management at all, so they are immune.

Last, Hyper-transport doesn't even mean you have more than one thread; it's just a bus for shuttling bits between the CPU and peripherals like the disk controller. AMD uses HyperTransport where Intel uses the North bridge to translate between FSB and PCI.

There is, however, another power management problem possibility. If the OS decides that the CPU isn't fully loaded, then it will throttle back on the CPU speed, which will cause frame rate loss; then the OS will decide it's busy enough and throttle up the speed again; repeating forever. This is a bad experience, caused for different reasons. Most games don't suffer this, because they just poll Windows events and render graphics frames as fast as they can. However, if you target a specific frame rate, and Sleep() (or WaitFor... or similar) to give up CPU time, then the OS will think you're not busy, and throttle back. This could happen on any system with power management, including hyperthreaded systems.

#35 Ah, maybe that's it. I dunno it doesn't allways happen with my HT system.

#36 This is all very worrying, and by the ammount of people that have posted, there is definatally a concern. The level i have now is barely runable on my amd duel core because it take 15 or 20 to get the fps back to normal. Seeing as millions of people have amd duel core based computers, by torque having this problem makes a big problem for our market audience in the games we make

#37 Agreed.

#38 @Matt & Steve: there's a bunch of fixes posted here garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=35267

#39 We had some problems this weekend with the rented dual-core AMD 64 bit machines we used for the Community Weekend. This patch fixed all the problems:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/Setup.exe

Try it.

I'd like to work around this though, as compelling users to install something like that is not ideal.

#40

Quote:compelling users to install something like that is not ideal.

The big question is why Microsoft can't just push out the appropriate code using Windows Update.