NewDark and high CPU usage

[663a2dcd1f226Jules]

(hopefully, I am posting this in the right place)

Because I know that some people that are fairly knowledgeable of the NewDark engine visit this forum, I feel like sharing an issue I've had for years and for which I've only recently found a solution.

Having exclusively been a laptop user for all my life, there's something that's really been bothering me for years with Dark engine games (specifically, their NewDark iteration) - high CPU usage. It would always be the case that every time I played a Dark engine game, be it TG/T2TMA or SS2, my CPU temperature would reach peaks of ~70 °C (150-160 °F), with the fan spinning full-speed all the time. The reason for this was that the engine would force the CPU to run at 100 %.

I had resigned to that being an unavoidable inconvenience which was anyway also typical of other old Windows games, until I ended up stumbling upon this post https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148828 on TTLG by another user who seemed to have been having my same problem. Apparently, all it took to stop this abnormal behavior was to comment out the 'd3d_disp_limit_gpu_frames 1 1' option in cam_ext.cfg. And work it did, with no observable differences in the framerate and with my CPU now running at a much more tolerable temperature of around 40 to 45 °C (~110 °F), with the fan no longer loudly spinning all the time. CPU usage was now reduced to about 10 or 20 % (I don't recall the exact value right about now).

I have no idea if this is an issue that everyone else encounters, or if it's as much of a problem on a desktop as it might be on a laptop. At any rate, having such high CPU usage for a two-decade-plus game is (in my opinion) not very desirable, so I'd feel like suggesting to comment out that line by default, especially with laptop users in mind.

Incidentally, does anyone have any idea why there are similar CPU usage spikes when opening the menu? This is nowhere as much of an issue as what I've described above, but I'd nonetheless be curious to know the reason and a workaround, if any.

[663a2dcd1f42avoodoo47]

Dark can stress your cpu if you are running it in high resolutions. remember, it was meant to be played in the 640*480 res.

so for example, I have a 12 year old top notch pc over here which in theory should be running SS2 without a single hitch, as the game is 2x older. well, not when I run it in the 1920*1200 resolution - with the additional SCP effects, the frames may dip under 60 occasionally.

[663a2dcd1f7afJules]

voodoo47Yeah, but my point is that without changing *any* setting other than commenting out the line I've mentioned, which means that I'm still playing the game at 1920x1080 with all other graphical settings at their default values, I've just gotten a massive decrease in resource usage.

[663a2dcd1f915voodoo47]

there are rare cases when people report unusual behavior, and sometimes there is no solution - microstutter would be a good example.

kind of odd that disabling d3d_disp_limit_gpu_frames 1 1 helped, afaik, that should be gpu related, not cpu (and most computers experience uneven frames when disabled, so it's recommended to keep it on under normal circumstances). but whatever works, I suppose.

[663a2dcd1fa27Jules]

I see, so apparently it's a problem that only occurs to certain users. Still, it might be worth pointing out in a readme or some other place like that - some other users experiencing abnormally high CPU usage might be able to solve it the same way.

[663a2dcd1fb21voodoo47]

give it a week, and google will start pointing to this topic.

[663a2dcd1ff93sarge945]

give it a week, and google will start pointing to this topic.

Give it a week, people will Google it, find the exact thread, not read it, and report the same issue in a new thread.

[663a2dcd2009cvoodoo47]

I have seen maybe three instances of people messing around with d3d_disp_limit_gpu_frames and achieving positive results total. so sure, why not.