lag hoodoo VIII: what would Henry do?

In this article, I'll look at a few odds and ends of lag reduction that that we haven't covered yet.

The advanced menu, activated with Control-Alt-D (it was originally called the Debug menu, hence the use of 'D'), gives us one or two possibilities to look at, depending on the particular viewer. First, there's an option under Advanced->Rendering called 'Run Multiple Threads'. If you have a multiple core CPU (quite likely if you've purchased you system in the last year or so), or multiple CPUs (less likely), selecting this can make a significant difference, at the potential cost of occasional crashes. If you have a single CPU, this will likely make no difference, and is best left off. If you're not sure what sort of CPU you have, try turning it on while watching the FPS in the Statistics Bar. If you see a significant improvement, then leave it on; if not, turn it back off.

Additionally, on the Snowglobe viewer and a few others that have borrowed its new texture pipeline, there will be a choice in the same menu for 'HTTP pipeline'. If it is there, turn it on. The difference it makes can range from very slight to huge, depending on several factors.

Disable voice from the 'Voice Chat' tab of the Preferences window if you never use voice, as that is an additional running process and a couple of libraries.

Aside from those, a few other things that can be done are general system maintenance issues. I won't go into great detail, as there are plenty of online resources. Defragment your hard drive if you're running Windows. Scan for viruses and spyware. Make sure you are not running services and other applications that you never or seldom use. Update the drivers for your graphics card, network, and motherboard.

Experiment with different viewers. There is no one viewer that is fastest on all systems in all situations, so find the one that works best for your. Some I have found to be generally faster are Emerald, Imprudence, and Cool. But sometimes, they're slower for some people. Also, some viewers have an optimised version available for newer CPUs. Unless your system is quite old, try that.

When in doubt, reboot. That's especially true with Windows, but also applies to Mac OS and Linux, if the system has been up for several days.

Remember, there is only so much you can do with software if your hardware is inherently limited; next week, we'll look at hardware, and then I intend to wrap up with checklist of sorts.