I thought I'd revisit this older post based on the discussion going on recently in "Meter Discussions" originated by Tightrope.
On the bottom of page 1 of Meter Discussions Tightrope said:
Tightrope:WGT claim they try to make the meter better,
still it looks the same for years now. Maybe it even looks the same as
it did in the very beginning? I am sure they have tried to tweak some
things here and there, but they have not succeeded. They can do more. I know they can do more and that is the reason I still post in these kind of threads.
I did some work in this post back on page 4, measuring the CPU impact of various actions we take in the game client window. That was in Dec. 2010 more than 18 months ago. So where are we now? Have WGT made improvements? Is the game running better than in Dec. 2010?
This morning, I re-ran a few of the tests I ran back in December 2010. Using the same computer, same ISP service, same affinity set up for Firefox and the Flash plug-in on CPU 1, low flash quality, aim arc and avatar movement turned on, etc, same same across the board as back then except I have a later version of Firefox (4.01) and a later version of Flash(11.2.202.235) and more importantly, the lates version of WGT's game (game 1.98.04, site 1.74.06)
1st retest: STANDING IDLE ON BPB #1 TEE BOX
Looks about the same to me. Idle time is still around 12%. 60 second periodic spikes are still there. No improvement in 18 months.
At the time I ran the test this morning I had 51 friends on my list. I always suspected the periodic spikes were related to friend updates so.....
I trimmed my list of friends this morning from 51 down to 35. Any change? Take a look...
Same conditions, just 16 less friends on my list. Those spikes are definitely shorter and skinnier. Meaning less work and less strain on our computers.
I'm convinced, the periodic spikes are due to periodic 60 second friend list updates.
I just don't understand why WGT would give our PCs more work to do while we're in a game and not looking at friends status? Make it so the update is done on the scorecard window, or when we pull down the friend menu.
2nd re-test: Zoom, move aim marker, zoom back repeated 3 times.
( I still had 51 friends on my list during this test)
Again it looks about the same to me. Its difficult to reproduce the same speed of mouse movements and timing of the zoom so the shapes of the peaks will vary.
No improvement in 18 months.
I got to thinking about what changes transpired in Flash over the last 18 months and recalled updating my Flash video card driver to get a version that could use the hardware acceleration feature of Flash.
So, I re-ran this test with hardware acceleration enabled in Flash. Interesting result I think. I had to change color to do a side-by-side comparison. The purple lines are the test results with hardware acceleration turned on in Flash (right click on the game client and select Settings).
That, IMO, is a significant savings in CPU work.
I'm keeping hardware acceleration enabled Not all video cards support it though. I believe it was a post by Infinito that got me interested in this.
Enough for today. My conclusion is WGT has made little if any optimization of their code in these areas during the last 18 months.
Adobe has given some of us an improvement.
I hope WGT has something in their planned optimizations dealing with the friend list updates in the game.