Everything you've wanted to know about FPS Boosting.

[Monk]

Here's most of what I know about windows, there is more, obiviously, but I put the most important aspects in here..

 

 

Question: Why does my rcon stats have alot of wild results for FPS?

 

Answer:

FPS stats are generated by measuring sleep() latency on windows. Sleep() latency is serviced by whatever HAL you have installed, and how good your motherboard is for timekeeping, and/or the tempature of your crystal oscillator and quality of it.

 

Sometimes, there is a signifigant amount of jitter (erroring) that is caused by a busted ACPI timer and or busted motherboard/bios. If your motherboard's ACPI timer is busted, try adding /usepmtimer to boot.ini so ACPI isn't used for timekeeping, and 8254/PIT will be. 8254 is very slow to read, because is lives off somewhere behind the PCI bridge and requires about 1500uS to read on modern hardware.. but it should be a little more stable. Most motherboard makers lost the ISA wait state option to tune the delay..

 

"Erroring" is something like this:

 

500fps

500fps

250fps <--- error

500fps

400fps <--- error

500fps

199fps <--- error

 

There are also a few other things that can cause signifigant error vs real time, such as power management stuff in the BIOS, SMI, USB controller, etc. All power management crap should be disabled if you plan on running any type of time sensitive stuff, like a game server..

 

 

 

Question: How do I get 1000 FPS Counterstrike Servers on Windows

 

Answer:

There are only 2 ways to do it. The first way, is only for windows 2003/2000. You will need to change your computer type to "Standard PC" from "ACPI multi/uniprocessor". This turns off SMP, but it services sleep() timers with the TSC, and gives ultra-accurate FPS down to 1.02ms (1.02 / 1000f = 980fps). TSC is a timestamp counter that lives on every CPU. It's very fast to read, and has a 64bit counter.. but it skews very easily because of all the power management tricks a CPU uses and isn't SMP friendly..

 

The 2nd way, is to run Windows 2008 and have a motherboard that supports HPET. HPET is the replacement for the PIT/8253 (Programmable Interval Timer), but it runs at a much higher frequency, around 10mhz and overflows in 5 minutes.. Nice to have, but older motherboards don't support them.

 

 

Question: How do I get stable, jitter-free FPS

 

Answer:

It's impossible to give accurate results with no errors. This is because of interrupt latency, clock skew/crystal oscillator quality, etc. The only true way is to run a realtime OS, which isn't cost effictive.

 

Question: I heard 1000FPS is just marketing and utter bullshit.

 

Answer:

I disagree. 1000FPS means very accurate timekeeping, but it doesn't mean it's a huge improvement over 512FPS. 512FPS is usually 1.95ms of sleep latency, whereas 1000FPS is usually less than that, around 1.02. It's an improvement, maybe in the single digit percentage. Overall, it's still an improvement..

 

 

Question: What's better for hosting. Xeons, or Opterons.

 

Answer:

There is no better. It's all about what you want. Opterons have a design that intels do not, and vice versa. I personally prefer opterons, because of NUMA, Hypertransport, Low memory latency, etc.

 

 

-M

[adamnp]

Solid post Gary, That should answer alot of the recurring questions regarding this issue

 

Thankies!

[Monk]

updating it with more info