Video Card Consumes Significant System Resources

LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, Alaska Icrontian
edited April 2006 in Hardware
Problem: Screen saver consumes significant resources. Specifically, when the screen saver is running on the computer, it heavily impacts the CPU. For instance, when the screen saver runs, points-per-day production on a Folding@Home Tinker work unit will drop from about 165 to 45. What video card settings and/or BIOS settings can I make to mitigate this?

System:

CPU - AMD 2800+ Barton
Motherboard - Abit NF7S-2
Memory - 2 X 512MB Geil PC 3200
Video card - ATI 9500 Pro, soft modded to 9700 Pro
Monitor - Samsung 930B, connected to the video card via DVI

I realize that a screen saver is not necessary with a TFT panel monitor, but the screen saver is a slideshow of family and home pictures, which we enjoy very much. It's a moving travelogue daily in our living room. The pictures in the slide show are all high resolution, averaging around 2MB + each.

Comments

  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited April 2006
    By the sound of it you just need to give up the screesaver. I don't know of any settings to change it other than to use "none" for a screensaver and set the monitor to swithc off after say 10 minutes. Those are fairly large files running on it as well as the resources the program itself utilizes.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited April 2006
    That's kind of what I figured. I've upgraded the Intel systems. Looks like the AMD system is a bit dated. We'll see what the new series of dual core AMD offerings brings. Sounds like a rebuild is in order in a few months.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited April 2006
    just for the sake of comparison, you might want to see what effect it has to run the Windows slideshow program without the screensaver running. Run it from the same folder your screensaver pictures are in and try to log resources used.

    I had a lot of trouble like what you're seeing when I ran any 3-D screensavers. I'm not sure why a 2-D slideshow would hurt that much. :scratch:
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited April 2006
    I'm not sure why a 2-D slideshow would hurt that much.
    Yes, that's what puzzles me.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited April 2006
    Fixed.

    It was pretty easy. I merely switched the screensaver program to Windows' "My Picture Slideshow". CPU usage went WAY down. Now the F@H work unit is only losing 3-5PPD instead of over 100PPD. I think it has to do with the settings I had on the other program, which included dithering. With the other program, Vuepro, the images were not only displaying, but were being processed in real time.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited April 2006
    Glad to hear it. :)
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited April 2006
    Glad to hear it.
    Indeed. That's a lot of free points per day I just found. It was not an option to turn off the slideshow screensaver. The slideshow runs constantly and is part of the room decor, so to speak.
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