Hey fellas, first of all - i dont know if its the right name for the thread.

Anyways ok, ive seen alot of post where people are whining about theyr fps in lfs and even in other games. So maybe we could find out nice tips to save cpu and let them get better fps.

Here's my little test, some people want to listen music with lfs. I made a little skin test with winamp and see what happened. Also, i tryed to make a little windows theme test but it didnt work out this time. I tryed it with aero effect and without, but unfortunately i didnt get any difference - few megabytes of ram and some cpu load difference.

Now, i can even use winamp default skin to listen music - when playng gta iv. When i tryed to play with bento skin then i had a little fps decrease. So, its a pretty good thing to know.

And please dont flame this thread or me if you got enough fast PC to run lfs without problems. Over time, ive seen that there are many people with slow computers. We need more players to lfs community, no matter what PC they got

here is a good site to see if you can run a game, before you buy it.
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

play your music from an external mp3 player by connecting to your line in. complete bus mastering. 0 cpu usage and 0 ram usage.

Quote from dadge :

play your music from an external mp3 player by connecting to your line in. complete bus mastering. 0 cpu usage and 0 ram usage.

What if someone doesnt have a mp3 player? Eh?

In some threads, ive seen that people want to convert files into ogg and then play them in lfs. But then as always, its pointless to do that while u still can run media player in background but thats where is the point. It kills fps on slow computers.

Quote from mutt107 :

here is a good site to see if you can run a game, before you buy it.
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

Thats a smart site indeed, check the attachment

I did some testing a couple of years ago and QCD Player was the most resource-friendly audio player then. QCD 4.51 with 4.20 skin in runt mode (see attachment) uses virtually no CPU or memory. Give it a try and see if it helps you out.

Quote from amp88 :

I did some testing a couple of years ago and QCD Player was the most resource-friendly audio player then. QCD 4.51 with 4.20 skin in runt mode (see attachment) uses virtually no CPU or memory. Give it a try and see if it helps you out.

Seems like a nice player, me myself - im going to stay on winamp (with default skin) because its enough cpu saving for me But people with slow pc's could try it out.

winamp = bloatware = wasted cpu

AIMP2 is very good player.

foobar2k is good aswell.

...if it mattered so much and the machine was slow enough that running a music player had an effect on FPS I would second the suggestion to use an external MP3 player, buy one

If you have some reason for nor wanting an external music player at least play the music files from a USB drive. The benefits gained are twofold with less disk reads(WinAmp reading song.mp3 while LFS calls for texture data or something)and the CPU waiting on all of this to happen. On older slower machines this becomes a problem and a bottleneck....and don't even dream of thinking about using un-powered USB hub's, that's a killer too...

Quote from CSU1 :

If you have some reason for nor wanting an external music player at least play the music files from a USB drive. The benefits gained are twofold with less disk reads(WinAmp reading song.mp3 while LFS calls for texture data or something)and the CPU waiting on all of this to happen.

Well, lfs doesnt have huge textures and mostly they are loaded in the ram so i dont think that it would slow down like that ..

Quote from hazaky :

Well, lfs doesnt have huge textures and mostly they are loaded in the ram so i dont think that it would slow down like that ..

...but you have to agree that having any application asking for data elsewhere on the drive whilst running any game is less than perfect, especially on older machines

Quote from Not Sure :

winamp = bloatware = wasted cpu

CPU usage doesn't seem to get higher than occasionaly 1% peaks and memory usage for winamp.exe is at ~8500kb while playing FLAC encoded media. Interestingly enough, playback for exactly same song in 192kbps MP3 requires 600kb more ram.

In any case, doesn't really seem like a massive resource hog.

Quote from CSU1 :

...but you have to agree that having any application asking for data elsewhere on the drive whilst running any game is less than perfect, especially on older machines

Thatswhy i made this thread, and i will mention again that some people dont have mp3 players and i belive nobody will buy mp3 player just to use it with lfs.

Or you could assign each program to different cores.

Quote from rc10racer :

Or you could assign each program to different cores.

Yes, possible but most slow computers dont have multiple cores. And its annoyng to set affinity on cores - everytime u want to play lfs. Because if i remember right, it doesnt remember the affinity setting when restarting or such thing.

AFAIK you can give some command-line parameters to launch program on some specified core.

You dont need any command line parametr.
Just launch TASK manager and then click under processes with right click on the process/exe file you want to set the afinity. You can choose the core then.

Yes, but then you need to do it after every LFS launch, and when you use cmd line parameters, you can add them to shortcut.

close things you don't use in winamp (media library, file scanning, mp3 player support, blah blah blah)
turn of visualizations
minimize it
then run your game. how does it go?

Use Winamp classic. Comes without all the useless bloat of full winamp.

Use spotify instead of winamp and such. Spotify demands less of my computer than winamp.

Or you can of course try what person above of me tells.

if you have mp3 files on your pc, there a very good chance you will have some kind of mp3 player to listen on the move. maybe a memory card in your phone (i've actually had my phone wired to my pc so callers would come from the shit speakers on my monitor).
or even a bit retro, got a mini disc player? or a cd player? or maybe a dvd player that supports mp3 playback?
you might have a mini-molex sitting about somewhere, connect that to your cd rom drive and the input pins on your mobo. you can then play cd's directly from drive to sound card. the cpu and ram are again not used this way.
or.....don't listen to music if your system is running low on resources.

And here is the definition of slow... My PC!

please csee this i found it very funny gfx card failed when it had all the requirements

Quote from skolekaj :

please csee this i found it very funny gfx card failed when it had all the requirements

Even if u have 2gb video ram, u can fail the test. Its all about clocks/processing thingy (65nm/55nm) and that kinda stuff.