GZDoom perfomance issue

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Contrary to popular belief, we are not all-knowing-all-seeing magical beings!

If you want help you're going to have to provide lots of info. Like what is your hardware, what is your operating system, what version of GZDoom/LZDoom/whatever you're using, what mods you're loading, how you're loading it, what you've already tried for fixing the problem, and anything else that is even remotely relevant to the problem.

We can't magically figure out what it is if you're going to be vague, and if we feel like you're just wasting our time with guessing games we will act like that's what you're really doing and won't help you.
undeadgamer9609
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by undeadgamer9609 »

Yes it is a DIY build.

Motherboard manufacture is ASUS.

Yes i bought windows 11 form the store.

The OMEN is for my monitor settings does not have the boosting software active and armory crate is for my motherboard updates i also do not have the boosting software active on that either.

I could not find services.msc active on task manager at all i do not know if it is on at all.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Blzut3 »

I should have specified services.msc is a program your can run (if you type services into the start menu it should find it). Or you can run it from the "run" prompt or command prompt/terminal. That said I think the process list has the info needed.

While you say you don't have the game boosting settings enabled on there, it is the one application that clearly has the ability to do this. Apparently called "Game Turbo"/"Foreground Application Acceleration" under "GameFirst". I would suggest to try uninstalling Armoury Crate and see if the problem goes away.

If it's not Armoury Crate, then repeat with OMEN Command Center. I believe it has similar features as "GameFirst" when used with HP OMEN pre-builts, so it's not a stretch to think it's bugged such that you don't see the settings but they're still enabled.

I'm not going to say you have to keep these uninstalled if you believe they're providing a value to you, but at least temporarily uninstalling them is the easiest way to rule out that they're causing your problem.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by phantombeta »

I agree with checking if Armoury Crate is causing you issues. I just recently got a new ASUS motherboard and considered installing it to control its RGB functions, but saw only complaints about that thing causing problems on the internet.
And it doesn't uninstall itself properly either, you'll need to find tools on the internet to fully get that thing off of your system. It installs a ridiculous amount of drivers, services and other programs that it then never bothers to uninstall when you try to remove it.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by undeadgamer9609 »

Ok so completely uninstalling armory crate and omen software did not fix the issue so they were not the culprit i knew they were not the issue because i had them on my pc for almost a week with no issue could not imagine why they would only affect gzdoom and everything else works fine with no issues.

Had to split the services.msc into two documents it was to big in a single document.
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undeadgamer9609
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by undeadgamer9609 »

So i looked in into doom on the kex engine and it does not lower its priority only gzdoom lowers its priority so it seems this issue is isolated to gzdoom then.

While doom on kex has performance issues i can't figure out where that one's cause is yet but if gzdoom's priority stays at normal the performance is stable.
Blzut3
 
 
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Blzut3 »

Nothing else is jumping out at me either in your process or service list.

How are you observing the priority change by the way?
undeadgamer9609
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by undeadgamer9609 »

Through task manager in details but for some reason the only process that does lowers it's priority is gzdoom i have tested around a dozen or more games and apps and they stay at normal never lowering do you think this might be a rare gzdoom bug or something like that just trying to find out why only gzdoom is affected.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Hellser »

Blzut3 wrote: Mon Jan 13, 2025 8:59 pm Only time GZDoom changes its priority is when you task switch away from it (and then restores to normal when returning). It does sound like you have some tool running either intentionally or via preinstalled bloatware that's trying to "optimize" your system.
When you alt-tab away from GZDoom (or go to a different Window) - it will lower itself down to Low then should return to Normal upon returning back to GZDoom. You have yourself a schrodinger's cat situation here where as GZDoom is either in the Normal or Low Priority until observed.

Again, something is turning GZDoom down to Low and GZDoom shouldn't be doing that unless it loses focus. :shrug: Something fucky is going on and given that you're the only one reporting this issue, I can't fathom what's going on. We've done what we could and the only time GZDoom ran normally is immediately after you refreshed Windows. To which this could be a Windows bug or one of the various drivers that Windows installs in the background, an update or undisclosed behavior is rearing its ugly head within Windows.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Blzut3 »

I don't daily Windows so can't confirm, but I believe setting i_pauseinbackground to 0 should disable the priority changing code, but yeah I suspect he might just be observing GZDoom lowering its priority while he interacts with task manager.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Rachael »

Blzut3 wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2025 4:13 am I don't daily Windows so can't confirm, but I believe setting i_pauseinbackground to 0 should disable the priority changing code, but yeah I suspect he might just be observing GZDoom lowering its priority while he interacts with task manager.
The logic in that was a bit weird but I went ahead and fixed it, and even took the extra step to add a cvar that will turn off priority changing entirely if disabled.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Blzut3 »

Honestly, I wonder if it might make sense to remove the priority changing code. I know it's not a lot of code so really doesn't make a difference one way or another, but a comment seems to indicate at one point the idea was to boost the priority for extra performance (guessing reverted to normal since doing that really isn't recommended). So might mostly be a relic from the single core days to make the debugging experience a little better? I could be wrong but I don't think this is a thing that's typically done by other games?
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by dpJudas »

If it were up to me I'd remove the code. First of all the OS itself already boosts priority on foreground apps. Secondly, lowering the FPS to 30 (or whatever it is set to) already deprioritizes the app when its in the background. Third, we live in a multicore world today, so its not like it directly interrupts the running thread of the foreground app anyway. And last, the thread still has to run eventually, so whatever micro-stutter its meant to avoid is still going to occur, if that is what is trying to avoid.

I also once read an article, although I can't really find it anymore to link it here, that effectively argued that the entire concept of thread priority class is broken. The issue is basically that in a chaotic world where there's literally hundreds of threads doing all kinds of stuff, knowing what is important how long a "low priority" thread can be delayed without severe negative impact is impossible to predict. It is a bad 90's idea that should be left there.

PS. If a debugger is attached to a process that changes thread priorities and how threads are scheduled too, so that also shouldn't be the purpose of this code.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Rachael »

I'm all for removing the priority changing code too. I never liked it in the first place.

There is some logic for it in the CPU measuring step, but even then I am a bit iffy on whether it's really necessary. And measuring the CPU speed is one of the "cool" things GZDoom does that's probably ultimately unnecessary anyhow.
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Rachael
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Rachael »

dpJudas wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 3:39 am Secondly, lowering the FPS to 30 (or whatever it is set to) already deprioritizes the app when its in the background.
I don't think GZDoom does this natively, yet, but it can be set to do so, I would like to make it optional though, and overall I think it's a good idea.
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Re: GZDoom perfomance issue

Post by Graf Zahl »

Rachael wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 7:14 am I don't think GZDoom does this natively, yet, but it can be set to do so, I would like to make it optional though, and overall I think it's a good idea.
There's the vid_dontdowait CVAR, but for obvious reasons it will be ignored if FPS are not capped.

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