andyson:
I couldn't help but think while watching bhoese's video it appears, to me at least, as if the CPU throttled back. The dots ran fast for a while then shifted a slower pace, then after a bit sped up, etc.
I know from prior tests I've done that having the green dots on screen uses a lot of CPU to calcuate and draw them. More dots on screen, more CPU power is used.
For those seeing the dots change pace, what power plan do you have set? Balanced? High Performance? Power Saver? Those are the three shown to me on my laptop with Win8.1.
I don't know if one of the performance changes under Balanced or Power Saver mode is to reduce the Frames per Second of the display.
FWIW, I run in High Performance mode and have yet to see dots change speed.
Just throwing it out there.....
I always run Game Booster, which flips all the high performance settings on...so that's not it.
I have two machines - a desktop that I almost always use, which has been great for WGT for a year and a half or so. That's the machine that has issues now, and the one on which the video was recorded. AMD quad core A10-5700 3.4 ghz, Radeon HD 7660D+ 7470 Dual Graphics 2GB integrated., 12 gb ram, win 7.
I also have a laptop that I haven't used much at all for WGT in the 8 months or so since I bought it because the meter has been bad. Intel I5-4200CM 2.5ghz , 8gb ram, win 7. It shows two display adapters (I have no idea why!), an AMD Radeon 8750M and an Intel HD 4600.
The video was recorded on Comodo Dragon version 29 with Flash 16.0.0.something. I went back to that exact same spot on Oakmont 12 in a Ranked Round so that I could switch between machines and browsers.
I got steady dot speeds in Comodo, Chrome, And Firefox using both Flash 16 and 17 on the laptop. (plus, the meter seems a good bit better now!). On the desktop, I got the same crappy results, even with Comodo upgraded to version 36.1.1.22 and Flash 17. I also got the changing speeds in Firefox and Chrome.
With the putting grid on, I opened the Resource Monitor and watched for changes in CPU, memory, networking, and disk usage, as well as any other processes that were popping up and sucking up resources. The only thing that I found is that the CPU would drop from low 30% when moving at normal speed (timed with a stopwatch compared to the laptop) to the high teens when the dots slowed, and one of the processors would park.
Also - this might be related or it might be a tangent - I found that the dots moved slightly slower on better quality flash settings with the desktop. They moved at the exact same speed regardless of flash quality or browser on the laptop.