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pjpeter

Join Date 02/2007

Slow computer performance when game is minimized (XP)

Hello,

This is just a question, not really a bug (unless I'm the only one). Does your computer, specifically in terms of graphics, act very slugishly when the game is minimized through Alt+Tab? Especially the graphics, everything else seems normal, but when scrolling through any website especially it is very laggy and not smooth at all.

This might be expected from newer games I'm not sure, I've only noticed it with GalCiv2...but I don't have the game open in the foreground so why would it be taxing my graphics card? Could it have all my video card memory reserved or something?

I'm using a system with a Dual Core Intel 2.0 GHz Processor and an ATI Radeon X1600 256mb (512mb w/Hyperthreading) graphics card.

Any replies are welcome. Thanks,
Peter

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What's your system memory? My first guess was that you are thrashing your virtual memory, but...only the graphics are slow, and on a dual core??

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Thanks for replying.

Ya I agree, it seems quite odd to me now. At first I just thought it was normal, since the game was running in the back, but my CPU usuage goes down and the fan gets quieter...everything else acts as if it's free and fine, with the game safely away in the RAM and not taking any other system resources. But the video is extremely laggy, worse than the 400Mhz PII w/128mb of RAM and a 32mb video card that I built for my father a few years ago. I've got a 2 GB of DDR 667 Corsair memory. It takes about 5-15 seconds to reload it when I alt+tab back into it.

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Does anybody have any other suggestions or ideas?

Is there anyone out there with the same video card who is not having this sort of problem?

Thanks,
Peter

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Voqar

Join Date 03/2003

+21

I experience the same thing. X2 4200, 2GB Corsair XMS, ATI X1800XT (512). When I'm alt-tabbed my graphics (web site scrolling for ex) are very slow. I have the same thing when alt tabbed out of Civ IV and some other games though, so I kind of expect it.

What I don't really expect is it taking the 10-15 seconds, or sometimes more, when I alt-tab back into GalCiv2, that's not really normal.

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Does anybody have any other suggestions or ideas?

I do.

Save and exit the game instead in minimizing it.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

What I don't really expect is it taking the 10-15 seconds, or sometimes more, when I alt-tab back into GalCiv2, that's not really normal.

When you alt-tab out, the game dumps the models from memory so there's *something* there for your other programs to use. It has to reload them all when you alt-tab back in.

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That's fine. I don't mind the time to load, at all. I did a check now and when I scroll through pages in IE, such as this one, my quickly rises to 50% or more and stays there until I stop scrolling and then goes down to 3-5%. It seems the CPU is being used entirely for graphics rather than the GPU. This sort of hardware emulation is what seems to be causing the severe lag in scrolling and other graphics intensive tasks. I have 1 GB free out of my 2GB of RAM at this point, scrolling, even just with Page Up/Page Dwn is painfully slow and is causing mass lag even on pages like this with very little graphics.

I noticed that too with Civ4 now that you mention it, it did the same thing with causing mass lag with the scrolling while having it minimized. I haven't seen it in any other game I play though, and I don't remember ever seeing it before on any of my other systems with older games. Does anyone know if it is an ATI specific thing or does it happen with all video cards?

Is it expected that GC2 will not release the graphics card for the rest of Windows to use while the game is minmized? Could it be a Windows bug (cause this doesn't seem like we should have these sorts of issues and it seems to be widespread...)

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I wrote this extra post with a potential fix I thought I found, but now doing further testing I found it is not really a fix at all, it only appeared to help because I had not yet gotten to the 'Galaxy View' - If you are at Research/Planet which the game takes you to on first load, you can alt+tab out with no performance problems, it loads faster on return and doesn't lag when you alt+tab out. But if you alt+tab from these or any other screen in the game after you have seen Galaxy View then you get the mass lag.

Is this an ATI specific issue though? Do Intel/nVidia users experience the same thing?

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Can anyone with a nVidia or other graphics card system take a sec and test if you see scroll lag while alt+tabbed out of the game (from the Galactic View)? It would be greatly appreciated if you could and it would only take a few seconds to do the test.

Thanks,
Peter

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Anyone with nVidia or other types of graphics cards can look at it? Seriously takes 10 seconds to see. I can look into getting this fixed possibly if I know the result...

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