Anyone heard of CPU speed control software?

[mgerics]

I was at an acquaitance's house and he showed me this.

This is a little Windows prog that (supposedly) can control machine speed. I don't know what it actually does, but I DO know that when it's run and set it to accelerate, then Quake II is run the player FLIES through the map. Or conversely, drop the speed by 4 and the player can target the bots faster than they can (running/walmig speed is slow, but it's nifty falling in slo mo and targeting bots (accurately) on the way down.

Doesn't work on 'good' Quake sites (i.e. anti-mod sites), but it is nifty to play with.

Pic view progs pop open pix almost instantaneously - overall, just about everything screams! (Firefox seems to dislike running if you use the tabbed feature)

Playing movies or mp3 gets distortion, e.g. skipped ime/frames.

I don't remember what it's called, but I want to know - WTF is it doing? How can the machine SCREAM along if it normally just zooms along ?

If the machine is capable of running at this speed, why doesn't it always ?

Switching between tasks does not appear to be affected.

[Lemmink]

I assume it is some kind of tasksceduler thst is targeted at givin 99.999% CPU time to the Task(s) of the Programmthat is currently at the foreground.

A game that throws the system out of the window (so no Multitasking at all) can do magic on a bare A500 while some system conform games that run on the WB sometimes need an 030 to run at all.

[Tomas]

Any link for this program?

[motorollin]

I think Lemmink is right. It must set the priority of the frontmost task to High. Obviously multitasking goes out the window as everything else loses out CPU cycles to the high priority application.

I wonder if there is anything like this for AmigaOS?

--
moto

[CSixx]

Setting priority to high will not make a game that is written by a halfway competent developer, speed up...

It sounds like you are talking about a program called "GEAR".

I'm not sure how it works exactly, but as I understand it:

Gear hacks some functions in windows that are commonly used by game programmers to limit fps, create timers, etc... It uses hooks to run its own code rather than the native functions. Now it can do things like, remove fps limits (making the game speed waaay up) or add additional delays to slow it down.

[mgerics]

Not sure - I had a software that set a tesk prority to high, then couldn't do ANYTHING else until I quit that prog - this software allowed my acquaintance to switch easily from task to task, and all of thm seemed to run great.

[Zac67]

Dunno if that's what you've seen, but PCs have had programmable (through I²C) PLLs for a couple of years now. There are some utils around that allow for changing FSB speed (within certain limits) while the machine is running.
I don't use them any more since I rather o'c through multiplier settings - my Athlon XP 1500 identifies as XP 2300 (1866 MHz)...  :lol:

[motorollin]

CSixx wrote:
Setting priority to high will not make a game that is written by a halfway competent developer, speed up...

It will if setting it to High allows it more CPU cycles than it has when set to normal priority.

--
moto

[Matt_H]

I wonder if there is anything like this for AmigaOS?

Executive, maybe? I've never used it, I don't know what it's capable of. But it is a task scheduler.

[a1200]

There is a program for mobile Intel processors called SpeedSwitchXP, which lets you override the Speed Step battery saving controls, for things like playing some games such as Unreal Tournament, it is essential!

[blobrana]

Hum,
my gigabyte PC Mobo came with a  CD driver that contains "Easy Tune" A  standard CPU  overclocking  utility on it...

Other software to really make your CPU cook can be found here:
http://www.directron.com/freeoverclock.html

[Tomas]

motorollin wrote:

CSixx wrote:
Setting priority to high will not make a game that is written by a halfway competent developer, speed up...

It will if setting it to High allows it more CPU cycles than it has when set to normal priority.

--
moto

That will really not make much of a difference, unless you also have another cpu intensive program running. A idle windows basicly use no more than 1-2% cpu at most and setting the priority of a game to high or realtime will not make a notciable difference other than the fact that it will slow down or completly halt everything else running with a lower priority.

Even running a game at idle will in many cases not decrease the perfomance of this game, unless something else in the background wants to hog the cpu too.

[JLF65]

Most Windows programs use timing run off the PIT in the mobo chipset. This is normally set to the longest period it's capable of generating - 18.2 ints per second. I've seen several "speed enhancers" for DOS/Windows where all it does is increase the frequency of these timing interrupts - for example, raising it to 182 ints/sec. Since the game still believes ints are occuring at 18.2 ints/sec, it thinks ten times as much time is passing and runs its internal updating ten times as fast, making the game fly compared to normal.