Priority dropping to low

[EnemyOfMan]

I noticed this first with Wrath of Cronos on Alien Vendetta in the later levels. Performance stuttered constantly. I bring up task manager only to find that priority for Zandronum has been set at low. I set it to high or realtime, play for a little, the choppiness returns, I check task manager again and low and behold priority is at low again. I tried this with different mods, different megawads and it does it for everything. My OS is XP SP3. I have no idea what's going on but I can't play with this problem occuring. Let me know if and what additional information you need from me to help diagnose what's going on.

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Something interesting to note. I played a game on a Shotgun Frenzy server through two maps, checked the priority of Zandronum multiple times and they all showed normal. Whatever is going on is happening only to my offline games.

[EnemyOfMan]

Apparently Zandronum is STARTING at low priority because I started up straight Zandronum with no maps or mods and checked the priority as soon as I started a game and it was at low.

[Dark-Assassin]

Windows automatically changes the focused window/application's priority to Normal or High.
So, if you go to Task Manager (Or any other application), of course Zandronum (and all other non focused windows/apps) will be set to Low Priority as it's no longer focused.

Anyway, from what I can tell, your CPU may not be handling those mods too well. They have fairly large maps and do not work smoothly on all systems.
Though, SF shouldn't be giving you more FPS over the other 2 mods normally, as it's more demanding on your system.

All I can suggest is to change your Power Profile from Balanced to Performance via Control Panel.
This should give everything a little boost, as they will run at their maximum potential. This includes your CPU and GPU.
It should also give (and allow) higher priority to focused applications.

[EnemyOfMan]

If what you're saying is true then how is it when I opened task manager while playing an online game of Shotgun Frenzy I saw Zandronum set to normal priority? According to what you're saying, as soon as the program is unfocused it should drop priority which I know for a fact is not true because I have alt-tabbed to task manager many many times for many different running applications and they didn't all automatically drop to low priority just because they were unfocused. Let me clarify something else. I am having problems with no other programs than Zandronum and I have other games that are much more demanding that don't exhibit the behavior I'm describing. This problem is particular to Zandronum. I don't know why, I don't know what's causing it but it's the only program dropping to low priority. No other process I have ever seen on any computer I've owned has done this.

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Watermelon already said on the bug tracker that this problem "Doesn't happen to me or anyone else I know" so how can what you're saying be true? If it were true then he would notice the same thing I'm noticing.

[Konar6]

Windows certainly doesn't switch priority levels by itself according to the program being focused or not.
This looks like a throttling mechanism of some kind running on your system or the hardware to prevent CPU overloading. Is it a notebook? Overclocked CPU? Or power savings mode enabled?

[Ænima]

I used to get this too (on my laptop).

[EnemyOfMan]

Not in power save mode. Hibernation is disabled. System standby is set to "never". I only noticed this peculiarity because I was having poor performance in game, and contrary to the suggestion that the mods were causing this, I have played them before without this issue. I have run wrath of cronos completely through Hell Revealed, experienced occasional drops in FPS but never the jumping/teleporting that I'm getting now. I also don't understand why setting it manually doesn't work. If I set it to anything else it will automatically drop back to low. So far no one has been able to explain why this is happening.

EDIT: This is on a PC, not a laptop.

EDIT 2: Not overclocked.

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Also, none of that explains why it only happens in offline games. Every online game I play whether through Doomseeker or IDE is set at normal priority. I posted this in the bug tracker and without explaining a damned thing they changed it to resolved. How exactly was anything resolved?

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I might also add since I just remembered it that the game of WOC - Hell Revealed was on a server, not in offline mode which would explain why I didn't experience any problems. I also tested the previous version of Zandronum and Skulltag and both of them default to low priority.

[EnemyOfMan]

Alright, here's something else to chew on. I open IDE start a single player game of Advanced brutal doom with av.wad av20.wad and av.deh loaded with it. I changemap to map13 and performance is instantly horrible. It seems spiky too. I get a second or two of OK performance then it seems to ramp up performance lag until I'm at 1fps. I picked level 13 because this is when I noticed it. Now, I conducted a small experiment by loading those exact same files in the exact same order onto a private server, changed to map13, joined the game and performance is as smooth as butter. Framerate is high, no jittering, no stuttering, no drop in FPS with the same exact files. Now could someone please tell me what the hell is happening between my offline games and online that causes such a vast difference in performance?

[Torr Samaho]

Zandronum sets itself to idle priority when send to the background and not connected to a server. You should be able to turn of this mechanism if you start Zandronum with "-noidle". Please check if this makes any difference.

[EnemyOfMan]

Zandronum sets itself to idle priority when send to the background and not connected to a server. You should be able to turn of this mechanism if you start Zandronum with "-noidle". Please check if this makes any difference.

It does indeed! Thank you for that bit of information!

[Torr Samaho]

I'm glad to hear that :).