SpaceSimCentral

Bugbear1973 wrote:
256GB SSD hard drive (I strongly recommend getting yourself an SSD - makes the OS fly)
Yup, gotta agree, best upgrade I've ever made was an Intel G2 80GB SSD as my boot drive when they were released

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Yup, gotta agree, best upgrade I've ever made was an Intel G2 80GB SSD as my boot drive when they were released
That must have cost an arm and a leg then I'm waiting for the cost to come down before I get one of those.Although saying that, they are probably not much dearer now than my noisy 160GB raptor drive was that I currently use for my boot drive.I installed one of the PCI ones on a nice i7 pc for someone though so I have an idea of how fast they can be SSD + RAID ftw....
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Runs Pioneer like a dream (as you would expect with those hardware stats) - Max planet detail, medium city detail
Just wait until you try a copy with terrain-threading enabled, you will be blown away

s2odan wrote:
That must have cost an arm and a leg then I'm waiting for the cost to come down before I get one of those.
Think it was a couple of hundred back then, so quite a bit. I'd still recommend one though, over and above most other upgrades especially CPU or ram unless you're really far behind the curve with those.

Netbook (runs ok at Medium to High):Arch Linux 64bitAMD E-350 1.6Ghz8GB DDR3RadeonHD 6310 384-1024MBLaptop (everything is set to highest and runs great except when looking back at a space-port just after take-off which can get a little choppy, the point at which you can see every single spaceport building at once):Arch Linux 64bitIntel i7-720QM4GB DDR3nVidia GT330MAlthough I am about to replace the above laptop with:Arch Linux 64bitIntel i7-2630QM8GB DDR3nVidia GT540MSSDs are a great investment, quite possibly the most noticeable way of boosting performance on a machine. Getting one depends on whether you can afford the amount of storage you will need though. 128GB ones are still around £160.

Bugbear1973 wrote:
Laptop - Alienware M17 R3Windows 7 x64Intel i7 processor16GB RAM256GB SSD hard drive (I strongly recommend getting yourself an SSD - makes the OS fly)Radeon 6870 1GB graphicsRuns Pioneer like a dream (as you would expect with those hardware stats) - Max planet detail, medium city detail
Don't know what's happened - must be some dodgy Windows update that has come down, but now Pioneer is no longer running like a dream. Oh it launches and plays, but now I am seeing a very noticable drop in my frames per second.Even with graphics turned down to minimum, I'd estimate that I'm getting something like 15-20fps. Not happy. Time to do some snooping around to see if anything I've installed recently is responsible...

Bugbear1973 wrote:


Bugbear1973 wrote:
Runs Pioneer like a dream (as you would expect with those hardware stats) - Max planet detail, medium city detail
Don't know what's happened - must be some dodgy Windows update that has come down, but now Pioneer is no longer running like a dream. Oh it launches and plays, but now I am seeing a very noticable drop in my frames per second.
Same version of Pioneer as before, or different? ie, your fault or ours?

robn wrote:


Bugbear1973 wrote:


Bugbear1973 wrote:
Runs Pioneer like a dream (as you would expect with those hardware stats) - Max planet detail, medium city detail
Don't know what's happened - must be some dodgy Windows update that has come down, but now Pioneer is no longer running like a dream. Oh it launches and plays, but now I am seeing a very noticable drop in my frames per second.
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!!!!

Bugbear1973 wrote:


robn wrote:
Don't know what's happened - must be some dodgy Windows update that has come down, but now Pioneer is no longer running like a dream. Oh it launches and plays, but now I am seeing a very noticable drop in my frames per second.
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!!!!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?

s2odan wrote:
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?:oops:

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

HeyIf 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 ramNvidia GTS 450 Graphics cardI 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 onIt 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 trailsRob