November 2004
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
10h 6m
English
Content preview from PC Hardware Annoyances
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3D ANNOYANCES
FIXING A POOR FRAME RATE
The Annoyance:
When I play games, my video card stutters and the frame rate jumps around.
The Fix:
No matter how fast and powerful our graphics cards become, the frame rate always seems to suck. Unfortunately, many factors affect game performance. Here’s a whole checklist of items to investigate:
- Check the graphics system requirements.
Your video card should use the chipset and onboard memory recommended by the game. Underpowered video cards will kill your frame rate (if they work at all).
- Check the other game requirements.
Your PC should employ the recommended CPU and RAM. Otherwise, the game will not operate at peak performance.
- Close other applications.
Operating systems can run numerous applications at the same time, but multiple applications siphon off resources (e.g., processor time and memory) from the game. Close all applications and reboot the system if necessary. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and use the Task Manager to verify that all other applications are exited (see Figure 3-17).
Figure 3-17. Use the Task Manager to see and disable any unwanted applications running in the background.
- Consider the game itself.
Most modern games offer a wealth of 3D-rendering features, including multiple lighting sources, real-time shadows, long ranges of sight, and other processing-intensive options. If you enable these options, it may bog down your computer and slow down ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.