Any way to force GPU usage?

Annalyse - Heavens Tear

I found a couple of threads on here about how PWI won't use the GPU, and have found that to be accurate on the new laptop I just got (Lenovo y50-70 Ultra HD)... but then I found out a few people do actually have PWI running off of their GPU and I'm wondering how that is done. It annoys me that it will only run off of the integrated graphics on mine.

So besides what I have already done (setting high performance, manually adding PWI to nvidia, setting global max performance in nvidia, starting PWI via the right-click and choosing video card) is there any way to make it use the GPU? Any does anyone have any idea why it seems to work for some people and not others? That's actually what baffles me the most.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple

No, and I have tested this to great extent.

I even tried speeding the game up by loading it onto a RAM disk. That increased FPS for about an hour, and then it was back to the same response time as it would have been on the platter drive.

Salari - Raging Tide

their either pulling your leg or have some type of emulator software that sends calls to the gpu. The game can not just run through a gpu. Changing some settings in the gpu's software can have some benefits, but it is not actually being used directly. It is just optimizing some parts of the game indirectly.

wilai29#4617

PWI runs mainly on the cpu and not gpu.
Don't worry about good fps in pwi because it will be bad anyways.
Unless the devs implement a modern engine for the game than it won't be any better

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

You cannot run games or any software through the GPU. The CPU handles the execution of software. Data can be sent to the GPU to handle complex math involving 2D and 3D space, as well as handling textures. Most typically this is for rendering purposes. However, they would have to be programmed to do so. PW is not programmed to do so.

Anyone who is telling you this nonsense needs to be smacked. Tell them to stop acting like they understand how computers work.

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

I even tried speeding the game up by loading it onto a RAM disk. That increased FPS for about an hour, and then it was back to the same response time as it would have been on the platter drive.

Was RAM disk software worth its price? I see them and I think to myself that a RAID 0 configuration of like 4 high-end SSDs would be better, but maybe that's because where I live they have rolling brownouts during late spring through summer, which can be seriously hazardous without a UPS. Anyways, you should detail your experiment a bit more, maybe on another thread. I'd like to know where you were, how populated it was, how much memory inflated overtime, the FPS overtime, etc. The momentary boost sounds like it could be caused by a small heap size, which gets inflated overtime because PW doesn't seem too interested in staying in tip-top shape. It would rather cache everything in memory and play the waiting game.

Annalyse - Heavens Tear

Thanks for the replies! Disappointing but not unexpected, I suppose.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

....Was a RAM disk worth its price? I see them and I think to myself that a RAID 0 configuration of like 4 high-end SSDs would be better, but maybe that's because where I live they have rolling brownouts during late spring through summer, which can be seriously hazardous without a UPS. Anyways, you should detail your experiment a bit more, maybe on another thread. I'd like to know where you were, how populated it was, how much memory inflated overtime, the FPS overtime, etc. The momentary boost sounds like it could be caused by a small heap size, which gets inflated overtime because PW doesn't seem too interested in staying in tip-top shape. It would rather cache everything in memory and play the waiting game.

The RAM disk makes stuff load really fast, but after it's loaded, the bottleneck is once again back onto the CPU and system bus. Initially it got about 130-ish FPS, but after a few hours running was back down to the usual.

SSD's aren't really any faster than your typical platters either, except for the initial load times. It's been fully tested and documented that there is no performance gain running SSD's/Raid/ect outside of decreasing the initial data load times.

Bellicious - Dreamweaver

I have to agree with Sylen here. SSD performance is only read/write speed, meaning load times. Once all of the necessary data is stored on RAM/vRAM it comes down to computation power of the CPU and GPU, and also how optimized a game is to determine how well it will run.

Anyhow, if you have a lot of overhead on your GPU you can always force 32x CSAA and 8x supersample to get rid of the awful jaggies.

Edit: Reread your post (Sorry I just woke up not long before reading this thread). It should be using your GPU even if you don't think it is. I have an optimus laptop too and setting elementclient.exe to use my GPU works. Check your GPU usage while in game with GPU-Z (Switching to the sensor tab) or playclaw (use the overlay).

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

The RAM disk makes stuff load really fast, but after it's loaded, the bottleneck is once again back onto the CPU and system bus. Initially it got about 130-ish FPS, but after a few hours running was back down to the usual.

SSD's aren't really any faster than your typical platters either, except for the initial load times. It's been fully tested and documented that there is no performance gain running SSD's/Raid/ect outside of decreasing the initial data load times.

I just tested PWI with a RAM disk and saw no discernible changes in performance. The only difference was loading speed, which is the same thing you'd see with HDD to SSD. Which is what I was talking about.

Bellicious - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Edit: Reread your post (Sorry I just woke up not long before reading this thread). It should be using your GPU even if you don't think it is. I have an optimus laptop too and setting elementclient.exe to use my GPU works. Check your GPU usage while in game with GPU-Z (Switching to the sensor tab) or playclaw (use the overlay).

Minimally. PW does not use the GPU for a majority of its calculations which is why the CPU always seems bogged down by it. For me, it uses the GPU so little, that it doesn't get hotter than its idle temperature and activity is scarcely seen above 3%, usually being 0%.

Bellicious - Dreamweaver

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Minimally. PW does not use the GPU for a majority of its calculations which is why the CPU always seems bogged down by it. For me, it uses the GPU so little, that it doesn't get hotter than its idle temperature and activity is scarcely seen above 3%, usually being 0%.

Mine doesn't even clock to full speed while using 32x CSAA and 8x SSAA.

it sits at like 740Mhz/1024Mhz with 40% util max (870M OC)

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

The only reason your card even ends up at 40% is because of the filters you have on. Turn those off and it will result in what everyone else gets, which is around 0%.

Also, my card is sitting at 300MHz core clock and 150MHz memory clock, which is its idle state. It's not even willing to clock itself higher for PW.

Random thing: I purposefully ran a low-overhead GPU stressor to cause the memory and GPU clock to tick at its max (1040MHz / 1500MHz), this actually did cause about a 20% FPS increase in a low-density population. In a high-density population it caused a 5% decrease. Very strange. In fact, its so strange I'm just going to go ahead and call it a coincidence. I would need to have it go for a while to be sure of the results seen. It was interesting to see 75 FPS. Rarely see anything like that with this game.

Annalyse - Heavens Tear

Bellicious - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Edit: Reread your post (Sorry I just woke up not long before reading this thread). It should be using your GPU even if you don't think it is. I have an optimus laptop too and setting elementclient.exe to use my GPU works. Check your GPU usage while in game with GPU-Z (Switching to the sensor tab) or playclaw (use the overlay).

I am using GPU-Z which is why I know that PWI is not using my GPU at all. The Nvidia card stays at 0 usage the entire time I am playing. I have set everything to high performance and added elementclient to 3D settings, and put the global settings to high performance as well. The other games I play show the Nvidia in use on GPU-Z but not PWI.

Bellicious - Dreamweaver

Annalyse - Heavens Tear wrote: »

I am using GPU-Z which is why I know that PWI is not using my GPU at all. The Nvidia card stays at 0 usage the entire time I am playing. I have set everything to high performance and added elementclient to 3D settings, and put the global settings to high performance as well. The other games I play show the Nvidia in use on GPU-Z but not PWI.

Ok well failing that... (please bare with lack of structure and or mistakes as I once again just woke up)

I have one final suggestion which forces your card to be used.
Close all instances of PWI
Download NvidiaInspector

Once downloaded, extract to it's own folder.
Run the .exe once completed that.
Where it says driver version, to the right of that is a settings button (Visually a spanner and screwdriver), click that.
Where at the top it says "_GLOBAL_DRIVER_PROFILE (Base Profile)" erase that and type in "Perfect World International" (It should come up as an option, you can click it to autofill). It should bring up driver settings.

Once on the driver settings scroll down to where it says... "Enable application for optimus"
Change that setting to SHIM_RENDERING_MODE_ENABLE
Click the apply changes button at the top right.
Go back into nvidia control panel and make sure elementclient.exe is set to your Nvidia GPU.

Once confirmed, load up PWI.

Evryn - Morai

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

No, and I have tested this to great extent.

I even tried speeding the game up by loading it onto a RAM disk. That increased FPS for about an hour, and then it was back to the same response time as it would have been on the platter drive.

Problem is that the game has some memory leak issues. Eventually it'll gobble up so much memory that Windows is forced to use the paging file. Which is usually on a platter drive. I sorted that out on my game rig by disabling paging alltogether - now it just plain crashes every 2 or so days, unless I reload it (I leave the game running pretty much nonstop).

Loading the game onto an SSD -can- improve the "feel" of the game if you are using a disk that's also used by the OS. Some things tend to be loaded on-the-fly, which can cause major stuttering in an area as you enter it - or when you encounter the model of a mob for the first time. The game will hang until the data is loaded from the disk, which on a slower access time drive (platter drives) can become noticable.

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

Evryn - Morai wrote: »

Problem is that the game has some memory leak issues. Eventually it'll gobble up so much memory that Windows is forced to use the paging file. Which is usually on a platter drive. I sorted that out on my game rig by disabling paging alltogether - now it just plain crashes every 2 or so days, unless I reload it (I leave the game running pretty much nonstop).

Paging should never be turned off, otherwise Windows can't log major problems. I used to disable it too, until I found out that Windows stores log info on it. It's kind of annoying when you have 32GB+ of RAM, but meh, it'll save you in the long run, I guess.

Bellicious - Dreamweaver

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Paging should never be turned off, otherwise Windows can't log major problems. I used to disable it too, until I found out that Windows stores log info on it. It's kind of annoying when you have 32GB+ of RAM, but meh, it'll save you in the long run, I guess.

What sucks is having PF + Hibernation.
>.>

Evryn - Morai

On a gaming rig, I'll take performance over the ability to log bluescreens. Matter of priorities I suppose...

Hibernation is configurable. If you don't want to use that, turn it off.

Annalyse - Heavens Tear

Bellicious - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Ok well failing that... (please bare with lack of structure and or mistakes as I once again just woke up)

I have one final suggestion which forces your card to be used.
Close all instances of PWI
Download NvidiaInspector

Once downloaded, extract to it's own folder.
Run the .exe once completed that.
Where it says driver version, to the right of that is a settings button (Visually a spanner and screwdriver), click that.
Where at the top it says "_GLOBAL_DRIVER_PROFILE (Base Profile)" erase that and type in "Perfect World International" (It should come up as an option, you can click it to autofill). It should bring up driver settings.

Once on the driver settings scroll down to where it says... "Enable application for optimus"
Change that setting to SHIM_RENDERING_MODE_ENABLE
Click the apply changes button at the top right.
Go back into nvidia control panel and make sure elementclient.exe is set to your Nvidia GPU.

Once confirmed, load up PWI.

Thanks for the suggestion and instructions. I did exactly as explained but it still does not appear to be using the Nvidia card. I have GPU-Z up and as I play the intel jumps up to 100% GPU Load but the Nvidia remains at 0% with everything else at 0 also.

I don't get why it seems to work for other people but it won't for me! It's frustrating to have to settle for using the lame integrated graphics when you have decent dedicated graphics.

Also, my apologies for probably poorly phrasing the initial question. I really don't know much about computers so my terminology might have been off. I was indeed asking how to make PWI use my Nvidia card instead of solely using my integrated graphics.

kirasin

BUMP

Hoping to read more on this topic.

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

What exactly are you expecting?

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple

kirasin wrote: »

BUMP

Hoping to read more on this topic.

If you're using Windows 10 64-bit, and do not run the client with administrator rights, it will max out your Swap at around 64GB and then your system will either crash, or you'll get errors about no free memory. (Even though your RAM is fine, it's because it's hit the size limit on the page file and then completely filled it.)

There's more information for you. It's vaguely related. b:chuckle

If you actually bothered to read the thread, a few answers were given that are known to work.
It's not the first thread on this subject either.b:bye