clustering and gaming?

[mosler]

is there anyway to use clustering to speed up gaming?

i imagine most games are single processes so probably not.

are there any cheap tricks to speed up gaming?

[Augustus]

that would be good.

[RogueHart]

plenty of cheap tricks. cant remember them all. but an easy one is to kill the explorer.exe. doesnt help much but if your just on the edge of being playable and not then it could put you over the edge. it did for me when i used to play WoW

[Augustus]

if i kill explorer.exe does this mean i can play my games on higher settings?

[ne3jedi]

if i kill explorer.exe does this mean i can play my games on higher settings?

Killing explorer.exe should just free up some ram which really helps when playing a game.

[RogueHart]

Killing explorer.exe should just free up some ram which really helps when playing a game.

what ^ said. it wont free up a lot. if your in need of performance then close any running programs(including background progs like torrents and xfire) and it will give you more ram and processing power.

to start explorer.exe after you finish your game just open up task manager(ctrl+shift+escape) and click new task. in the new dialogue type explorer.exe and click okay and that should start it back up.

if its an game that plays over the net then youll want to close any torrents and anything connecting to the net in order to improve your connection speed. that makes a big difference.

[dlots]

Clustering won't help your gaming pretty much at all

Clustering is good for stuff that doesn't care about latency and is processor intensive like video encoding, password cracking ect, but by the time it would take to bundle up game information and send it off to a different computer have that computer process it and get it back the info would be old and not needed any more. Generally the issue with gaming is lack of RAM so it has to pull info off the hard drive with is about 1/1000th the speed of ram not the processor

[Razor512]

wont help, it may even slow you down if you can even find a way to do it

the best thing you can do is use starter http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-...k/Starter.shtml

and disable all unneeded startup items and services

after that, get a copy of autoruns http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb963902.aspx

then further strip down the startup of pre boot items

then after that just manually clean up the registry and further disable useless parts of windows

(after doing this, you should get around a 14-17 second bootup to get the the desktop and have all loading 100% done

(worked for me and really helps with gaming, and also keeps windows from using more than 80MB memory at startup, which leaves a lot for running your apps)

(the less resources windows uses on it's self, the more there wil be available to run your other apps and games (and you get a noticible performance boost )

PS even if you can get the latency low enough, the network interface is far too low bandwidth to handle all of the info being tent back and forth

windows with around 12 running processes

http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/4412/clipboard3kk7.jpg

windows with around 27-30 running processes (mainly the stock stuff that comes with windows xp pro and avg antivirus )

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/694/clipboard4vm3.jpg

most new games barely use full cpu usage though, there mostly GPU and memory intensive

but prioritize the videocard over memory and cpu as it is often the first to bottleneck

connecting multiple systems together also introduces a performance overhead.

when you connect 2 pcs together, even if there the same speed, if you share a maya render task between both of them, it wont double the speed, it may give you around a 60-70% boost and the higher the bandwidth needed, the larger the overhead gets.

it is also probably why SLI with 2 videocards only gives yo around a 30% performance boost

[VaKo]

Disabling stuff with have a minimal effect, as has been said upgrade your RAM to as much as you can afford, then look at your GPU and CPU.

[Razor512]

PS if you have been thinking about getting the new spiderman game, don't

(I tried it on my pc and it lagged like crazy and crashed a lot)

crysis on medium settings looks much better than the spiderman web of shadows game and runs smooth

I then tried it on my friends computer, he has a 8800gt , and he can run crysis on high settings with no problem, it lagged a bit for him also

and during the entire laggy moment, on both of our pcs, the game only uses 40-50% cpu usage

fall out 3 can max out with no problem and looks good on both systems and also doesn't use full cpu usage, around 60-70%

the only game that lags more than spiderman on both of our pcs is second life

PS while disabling items wont magically make a game that lagged like crazy, suddenly run smooth but is will give you a few extra FPS which can mean the diffeence between "omg wtf how can something lag this much" to "it lags but at least it is still playable"

as you can see even from my benchmark, it only made a slight performance difference but still every bit counts :)