How much is GPU performance affected?

[Coldblackice]

What system variables in particular have tangible affects on GPU performance (like when gaming)?

When I play a game, my OCD requires that I close down pretty much everything -- browsers, documents, PDF's, antivirus/antimalware scanners, etc. -- every last bit of something that I can close or stop, on the hope that every little "bit" could/should help to squeak out a couple more FPS. I do this even when I have ample free memory available and very low CPU usage eaten (from the collective whole).

Does doing this really have any tangible effects on GPU/FPS performance?

I can understand if there were programs or services running that were significantly chewing up CPU, memory, or disk usage -- but if that's not the case, would the GPU performance be the same either way?


I can (and should) test this to quickly determine whether or not it helps. But I'm curious on a theoretical level -- when a GPU-intensive game is being played, besides the raw speed/memory/power of the system equipment (GPU/CPU/memory/disk), what other "external" or secondary system variables could/would negatively affect a running game's FPS?

 

[KazeoHin]

If you have a lower-end dual-core rig with ~4gb of RAM, yes, it makes a big difference. That is mostly because your system specs are spread thin. Most games require at least two cores and ~3gb of RAM, so any other applications open are eating into potential game resources. That means the CPU cores have to juggle between OS and application tasks AS WELL as run the games. If you have a quad+ core and 8+gb or RAM, MOST games will run fine regardless of what is in the background. This way each clock cycle, the CPU can run two game threads and two miscellaneous application/OS threads without slowing down. NO 32bit application (read: any game other than the original Crysis) can take advantage of more than 4gb of RAM, thus meaning 8GB gives you 4gb surplus to be used for background tasks. If you were to dissable all background tasks on a 4+core system with 8+GB of RAM, you will save maybe a half frame per second faster but is that really worth it?

 

[linziyi]

I will say not much, the background programs don't use up as much memory and CPU compare to the game itself; Unless you are running some CPU intensive programs like compiler, renderer etc.

 

[Mav451]

Heh I haven't done any of that since 98SE/XP vanilla. After SP2, the necessity for tweaking became a far less priority to me. If you're on a modern OS (7 or 8), you really should not be worried at all.

If you are a bencher, then yeah you may be concerned with closing open programs. But benchmarks have rarely (if ever) represented real-world performance. And on [H], I would hope the focus is on real-world performance

 

[Yoda4561]

With modern multicore CPU's, huge amounts of ram, and multicore aware operating systems, there's no problem leaving most everything in the background. Even some processes like folding have a low process priority so they don't decrease performance by much either even when left on. What can be an issue are programs that like to hog the HDD, complete system hangs can still happen while the OS waits around for the hard drive to finish whatever it was doing before and become responsive again.

edit: Stuff like file transfers, antivirus (the biggest culprit), virtual machines/ramdrives with periodic auto-save, etc can all hog the HDD at unexpected times.

 

[Coldblackice]

Gotcha, thanks all. I guess it's just old habits carrying over from the Win95/98 days. Old habits die hard

And duly noted on the antivirus -- I don't know what's up with MSE, but the infernal thing will just randomly and sporadically spike (and hover) around 30-40%. I guess the sucker will continue to get disabled when gaming.