system requirements
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system requirements
anyone know what the 'system requirements' are for RTC?
I have a AMD athlon 64 X2 duel core 4200+ 2.21Ghz processor with 1Ghz of ram, and RTC seems to uses 50% of my CPU usage, which is 100% on a single core processor system!? which seems alot.
although i can still have the program running in the 'background' and get on with other things? can anyone else? (with single core processor systems)?
I have a AMD athlon 64 X2 duel core 4200+ 2.21Ghz processor with 1Ghz of ram, and RTC seems to uses 50% of my CPU usage, which is 100% on a single core processor system!? which seems alot.
although i can still have the program running in the 'background' and get on with other things? can anyone else? (with single core processor systems)?
Last edited by rob3034 on Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.
- George Gilbert
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The DM / CSB dungeons on RTC run OKish on Win95 with 200 MHz processor. DM-II requires a bit more oompf (lots of graphics / background music) though, but it's not a whole lot more.
As Sophia said, anything from this millenium will be fine!
BTW; the reason why it runs up at 100% of a single processor is because it's running "as fast as possible" - it'll take anything you let it have; it only "needs" a small fraction of it to run at an acceptable rate though.
Adamos computer is coal powered, and it runs RTC OK...
As Sophia said, anything from this millenium will be fine!
BTW; the reason why it runs up at 100% of a single processor is because it's running "as fast as possible" - it'll take anything you let it have; it only "needs" a small fraction of it to run at an acceptable rate though.
Adamos computer is coal powered, and it runs RTC OK...
it runs ~ok, but only on fullscreen, not in windowed mode. But I cannot play it on fullscreen because of some reasons.
PII 300 Mhz, 96 Mb (or 64? sometimes I`m not sure if those additional 32 works!), 1 Gb Hd, XP
PII 300 Mhz, 96 Mb (or 64? sometimes I`m not sure if those additional 32 works!), 1 Gb Hd, XP
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Adamo, have you switched off all that fancy stuff (transparent/fading menue, automatic update etc.. ) XP gives you by default? I don't know if this article still works, seems not to be the case sadly..
http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/123
but there were some things described how you save cpu power and memory in xp..
http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/123
but there were some things described how you save cpu power and memory in xp..
And old machine? Bah, it runs everything fine and is still powerful enough thank you...i don't plan on running any more bloatware than I have to, nor play the latest games that last for two seconds, so really it is fast enough thank you!
I certainly won't be getting windows vista after selling my kidnies for the proper machine specs...this lapto can run the latest linux perfectly happily, which, you know, pretty much has all the features of windows vista without being an evil bloated resource hogging pos
I certainly won't be getting windows vista after selling my kidnies for the proper machine specs...this lapto can run the latest linux perfectly happily, which, you know, pretty much has all the features of windows vista without being an evil bloated resource hogging pos
You really don't need much. 75 FPS is fine, but the game runs quite fine and fluently at 30 FPS too. The only config option that makes much of a difference in regard to ressources required is cloud rescale, which is off by default.
I have RTC runnung on 2 machines, my desktop and my laptop, both use WinXP Pro, which IS eating up a bit of the ressources available.
The desktop is an old Athlon AMD 1GHz with 768 MB RAM, the laptop is a very old pII with about 300 MHz and 256 MB RAM. I can play all dungeons I've tested so far on the desktop, I can play most of the default dungeons on the laptop, except DM2 which is lagging too much there.
I have RTC runnung on 2 machines, my desktop and my laptop, both use WinXP Pro, which IS eating up a bit of the ressources available.
The desktop is an old Athlon AMD 1GHz with 768 MB RAM, the laptop is a very old pII with about 300 MHz and 256 MB RAM. I can play all dungeons I've tested so far on the desktop, I can play most of the default dungeons on the laptop, except DM2 which is lagging too much there.
Parting is all we know from Heaven, and all we need of hell.
- George Gilbert
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What the engine is doing is irrelevant to the CPU usage.
The game itself (i.e. dungeon updates and drawing the view) only occur at 1/6th second intervals and take very little time or CPU. A tiny amount of extra time is then spent tracking the mouse and background music. The vast bulk of time however is spent paused in the Windows DirectX Flip function waiting for a vertical blank so that the screen doesn't flicker from frame to frame (as Beowuuf said, it's Windows that's hogging the CPU, not RTC).
Whether the game is paused or not doesn't therefore make any noticable difference to what the CPU is doing; it still spends virtually all its time paused in DirectX screen handling functions...
I.e. it's not "just" your machine, it's *everyones* machine - it is always doing something and will run at 100% even on the most powerful supercomputer in the universe...(assuming it's running Windows )
The game itself (i.e. dungeon updates and drawing the view) only occur at 1/6th second intervals and take very little time or CPU. A tiny amount of extra time is then spent tracking the mouse and background music. The vast bulk of time however is spent paused in the Windows DirectX Flip function waiting for a vertical blank so that the screen doesn't flicker from frame to frame (as Beowuuf said, it's Windows that's hogging the CPU, not RTC).
Whether the game is paused or not doesn't therefore make any noticable difference to what the CPU is doing; it still spends virtually all its time paused in DirectX screen handling functions...
I.e. it's not "just" your machine, it's *everyones* machine - it is always doing something and will run at 100% even on the most powerful supercomputer in the universe...(assuming it's running Windows )
- Paul Stevens
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It certainly should not be using your valuable CPU timeThe vast bulk of time however is spent paused in the Windows DirectX Flip function waiting for a vertical blank
looping around waiting for what should be interrupt-
driven. Something is wrong. Looping in the code
waiting for an event is something that DOS programs
did. But Windows programs are not supposed to have
to do such things. From the Microsoft documentation:
So the very worst that should happen is that when youOur thinking at the time was that a program could use this period to scurry off and attend to other tasks, returning later to attempt another flip. Developers didn't seem to think this was a good idea, however, and we constantly saw small loops in code spinning on the Flip method until the flip could be set up. This offended our sense of tidiness, so we added the DDFLIP_WAIT flag to push the loop down into DirectDraw.
receive the DDERR_WASSTILLDRAWING status the
program should give control back to windows and try
again in a few milliseconds. It is not a matter of getting
back at a particular instant because more than one
entire frame is sitting there waiting to be displayed.
- George Gilbert
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- Paul Stevens
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Yes, that is what I gathered from the description.
Having had to 'invert' a DOS-Like program (ST CSB),
I know it is no fun. In a couple of places that are
reached very seldom (Like the end-game) I took the
shortcut of simply giving control back to Windows
within such a loop:
It is not the right way to do things but everything
has a price and the price to make it right was too
high for the gain in beauty.
Having had to 'invert' a DOS-Like program (ST CSB),
I know it is no fun. In a couple of places that are
reached very seldom (Like the end-game) I took the
shortcut of simply giving control back to Windows
within such a loop:
Code: Select all
Loop:
jumpIfReady
Sleep(10)
GOTO Loop
has a price and the price to make it right was too
high for the gain in beauty.
- Sophia
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Using a large portion of a processor that'd otherwise be idle is an irrelevant concern, as long as you're not wasting cycles. If you're not running anything else of significance at the same time, just about any game is going to take close to 100% CPU.
If I run DSB with nothing else going on, it takes 98% CPU. I then ran a bunch of cpu-intensive stuff at the same time, and its usage dropped to 75%, however, neither the performance of the applications nor DSB's performance was impacted.
If I run DSB with nothing else going on, it takes 98% CPU. I then ran a bunch of cpu-intensive stuff at the same time, and its usage dropped to 75%, however, neither the performance of the applications nor DSB's performance was impacted.
If every single cycle isn't needed, it's very easy to bring the CPU usage down with a tiny sleep or a wait every frame. The framerate can also be capped. If you'd aim for 50 FPS you'd have 20 ms for every frame. Now, if the frame actually takes only 5 ms, you can sleep for 14-15.. Keeps the processor cooler if nothing else.. The minimum that should be done in my mind, is to put the app to sleep when it's minimized to system tray..