Can *ANYBODY* actually 12-table at Party without CPU lag?

[_dave_]

Toasta - Wow [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

Juk, just a random blast from the past - make sure cards are 8-bit colour depth. I remember some 24-bit Party card mods causing increasing lag such as you describe.

[jukofyork]

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Toasta - Wow [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

Juk, just a random blast from the past - make sure cards are 8-bit colour depth. I remember some 24-bit Party card mods causing increasing lag such as you describe.

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Thanks, but just checked and they are 8bit.

I just seem to be up against a brick wall trying to make Party not update it graphics so often. It appears to not use: BitBlt, StrechBlt, MaskBlt, PlgBlt, TransparentBlt, SetPixel or SetPixelV to draw it's table graphics. I can't think of anything else too try and it doesn't use DirectX so I'm guess it just uses memcpy() instead and I can't do anything with that.

So next I wasted the last 5 hours trying to hook BeginPaint and only pass out the correct region to be updated once every second, but it seems that whatever I do I just cannot get it to do this. I can block party from drawing anything at all by returning NULL and it's CPU time drops significantly, but I cannot set the regions to be updated whatever I try to do. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[PatInTheHat]

I can 12 table for a while but after an hour or two it starts getting laggy. Unbearable doesn't kick in for some time after but I frequently reboot my computer between sessions. (its a brand new DELL XPS, fully loaded)

[jukofyork]

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I can 12 table for a while but after an hour or two it starts getting laggy. Unbearable doesn't kick in for some time after but I frequently reboot my computer between sessions. (its a brand new DELL XPS, fully loaded)

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All I know is I used to be able to play fine and now I can't... I've tried everything I can think of and nothing has helped and I'd rather just poke my eyes out than call some useless [censored] Indian in Party's technical support department as (there's more chance of winning the lottery without buying a ticket...).

I can't simulate it either, as I can open 100's of tables without playing and no lag, but 20 mins into a seesion playing and it's totally [censored] up and unplayable.

I've put up with disappearing buttons, and even had to find my own machine code patch to stop it crashing before, but I can't see any way round this. My only option now looks like wasting a great deal of time writing something that will let me play when the tables are minimized and tbo I just can't be bothered with it anymore.

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[jukofyork]

Look very carefully at the Hand #, the bets and the player names:





I'm not 100% sure how I've done this, but I've somehow got my Party to revert to using a much simpler/faster way of resizing the images. At first I thought maybe I was imagining it, but I did remember the writing being slightly "fuzzy" as though some kind of filtering had been done on it. As soon as I went into another user area and started Party I could see clearly the difference!!!

I've tried so many things and crashed/upset the Party client so much today that it could be anything and I've not had chance to try playing any SNGs yet, but I have a strong feeling that whatever I've done will have fixed the chugs (my Party used to look like the bottom image before and the code Party is using for it's smoothing looks like it's using a whole lot of "Party's own" image format routines and is probably very very in-optimal).

I'll report back on how I get on tomorrow - Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

PS: Looking at my it more carefully now, and it <u>definitely</u> never looked like this before. The non-fuzzy version has 6's that are a bit hard to read (they look like 8's) and if it ever did look like this before I would have noticed.

[ghaz]

&lt;3 Juk.

If you fix this I will be eternally grateful...

You might be on to something... I find if I make my tables full size it lags a lot less (cash games). It might have something to do with the scaling you're talking about.

[TIGERsrm]

Ummm.....can anybody actually 12 table at party full stop??
Playing 4 tables at party seems like playing 12 at stars.
Any software suggestions to make multi-ing at party easier?

[jukofyork]

I didn't want to post until I was 100% sure, as I've thought the lag has gone before only to find it was just a temporary respite from it, but today I have played 2x4.5 hour sessions, 11/12-tabling the whole time (200+ SNGs) and not had any problems at all - this is a far cry from yesterday where I played 22 SNGs and had to quit from the lag.

It turns out that what Party did was turn off "font smoothing" and that seems to have fixed all my lag (this is what was causing the difference in images I posted yesterday). I've had it turn off "show window contents while dragging windows" before, but it never touched "font smoothing" until yesterday.

I'm also now running both my monitors in 16bit colour while I play and that seems to be helping iron out any last bits of lag (Party is running much better today than it ever has before!).

Hope this helps some others too - Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[tagg]

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It turns out that what Party did was turn off "font smoothing" and that seems to have fixed all my lag (this is what was causing the difference in images I posted yesterday). I've had it turn off "show window contents while dragging windows" before, but it never touched "font smoothing" until yesterday.

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Where does one find these options? [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

[AndyP]

Changed my color bit and I can feel the difference already.