3 ms·
On the other hand, I distinctly remember having Imagine or Lightwave doing actual ray tracing in the background (clearly taking up 100% CPU), while I was playin
by danielbarla 9y ago
On the other hand, I distinctly remember having Imagine or Lightwave doing actual ray tracing in the background (clearly taking up 100% CPU), while I was playing some simple game in a window in the foreground.
Having set the foreground window to high priority somehow seems to have worked back then, but for whatever reason doesn't seem to work on today's typical PCs. Random things seem to make ridiculously powerful machines pause for whatever reason, even without having processes take up 100% of the CPU.
- AstralStorm 9y agoThis is the difference between a real time operating system and one that is not. See BeOS for a newer take. Or MorphOS. (X86 has a few things that can break realtime performance, such as broken firmware handling of SMI.)
- wolfgke 9y agoWhat you told is probably an important reason. But another one is that modern x86 cores clock down if there is load on multiple cores (to prevent heating issues) or even clock up for a short time (e.g. Intel Turbo Boost) if only a single core gets a load peak without much load on other cores. In practice also often insufficient cooling is a reason why the computer gets "slower/sluggish" if there is a high load in particular on multiple cores. The cooling of practically every laptop available is in my opinion undersized (to save space) and if dust gets into the fan (it will gradually) this will get even worse. Luckily most gamers ("PC Master Race") know how important a sufficiently dimensioned cooling is for their self-built PCs.