Same version of Pioneer as before, or different? ie, your fault or ours? 🙂

I've got Alpha 12 on my machine still, getting the same behaviour. I'm taking blame for this one, even though I've yet to determine what I did!!!!

I've got Alpha 12 on my machine still, getting the same behaviour. I'm taking blame for this one, even though I've yet to determine what I did!!!!

Don't know whether I should start a new thread for this...If a forum moderator sees fit to do so, then please be my guest.

As mentioned above, up until recently, Pioneer has run like a dream on my well provisioned laptop (Max planet detail, Mid city detail). Now I get a very low frame rate.

I've windowed Pioneer now, and am monitoring it's resource usage using Process Explorer:

[attachment=893:Pioneer perf.JPG]

You can see the CPU pegging at 12-13% - which means that it is using 100% of it's allocated processor/core.

The big jump in Private Bytes usage is due to me ramping the graphics detail from Low planet, Low city to Max planet, Mid city.

Looking at the threads in use for Pioneer.exe we get:

[attachment=894:Pioneer perf threads.JPG]

So...I was half expecting Pioneer.exe to be waiting on a child thread. (Although I do sysadmin for a living, I don't usually delve into troubleshooting applications in this way, so my expectations may well be unfounded).

Perhaps my next stop should be any logs that Pioneer could provide.

Suggestions will be appreciated but I'll be doing further investigation... 🙂

It actually looks like win7 is changing Pioneer's processor affinity and selecting only one core. Pioneer should actually use 25% of your pc perhaps up to 28%, certainly 28 when rendering a detailed planet and calculating that perlin -> mesh stuff.

Un-edited it should use approx 2 and a little bit cores in the most extreme situations. The 'little bit' is the shaders AFAIK.

By contrast with my setup which is a quadcore intel q6600 I'll get up approx 55% usage in the extreme situations. Like highest detail on a detailed world maybe while fighting 🙂

Have you tried 13 yet?

I'm seeing the crappy frame rate with Alpha 12 and 13, which actually leads me to think it's something external to Pioneer itself (I mean, both Alpha 12 and 13 have been observed to give excellent performance on my hardware).

I'll do some more fiddling around when I next get a chance and see if I can alter the number of cores being allocated...

😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳

OK, now I'm totally embarrassed.

I've been doing a bit of coding lately, and to maximise my battery life I switched off the high performance graphics.

Well guess what? Switching back to high perf GPU restored Pioneer to its former glory.

Who'da thunk it?

😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳

Well done, I had a feeling it would be something silly like that when I could see pioneer only running properly on the single core. But its weird how the GPU in low power mode would make it do that 🙂 Happy flying commander 😉

Hey

If it helps for future reference I am running Pioneer under Win XP pro 2002 edition with SP2.

AMD Athlon, 64 x2 Dual Core 5000+ 2.61ghz with 2gig ram

Nvidia GTS 450 Graphics card

I have everything set on ‘high’ with planet detail ‘very high’

Screen res of 1280x800 (although it will go higher without any major hit of FPS)

Shaders, HDR and Planet textures on

It runs smooooth!!! 😉

No issues so far – although I haven’t got out of the Sol system since I downloaded on Saturday …. I’m enjoying the scenery of my local region of space at the moment and trying to capture some screenshots for posting at sometime……. 😀

Happy trails

Rob