Mashed Articles

Read on to find out how just tweaking two configuration settings almost tripled our Crysis frame rate.

Nothing is quite as demanding on your system as a cutting-edge game. To get playable frame rates you’ll generally need lots of fast RAM, a powerful graphics card, a decent CPU and a speedy hard drive. But if your PC isn’t quite up to scratch, don’t give up immediately – there are a few tweaks you can apply that may improve things.

As we’ve already mentioned, detecting and removing resource-hungry processes, freeing up RAM and keeping your hard drive defragmented and optimised will make a real difference.

Updating your video drivers can deliver even more benefits. For example, Nvidia claimed that its 195.62 release would increase performance by 10 to 20 per cent in many 3D games, as well as by 38 per cent in Far Cry 2, and by up to 80 per cent in Lost Planet: Colonies. Impressive? Yes, but unfortunately the driver was soon withdrawn because users were reporting that their cards were overheating, so updating on the day of release probably isn’t the best idea. Stay aware of what’s going on, but let others try out new drivers for a couple of weeks before you jump in.

In the meantime, you can always get an immediate speed boost by overclocking your video card. It’s surprisingly easy.

Overclock your card

Launch the Display Settings applet, click ‘Advanced Settings’, choose your display adaptor’s tab and fire up its control panel. If this is an ATI card then you should see an Overdrive section with sliders for GPU core and memory clockspeeds; Nvidia cards have the same, and add a Shader Clock slider for good measure. (Don’t see that? Make sure you’re using the Nvidia drivers, not those provided with Windows, and install the Nvidia System Tools.

Keep your video drivers up to date to ensure the best possible performance

Tempting though it might be, don’t immediately push all these sliders to the maximum just to see what happens. Your PC will almost certainly crash, unless your video card overheats and dies before that happens.

It’s much better to take a gradual approach, one slider at a time. Push up the Memory Core clock by maybe 10MHz, save the changes and then run something like the Crysis benchmark tool. You’ll also need the demo.

If the demo looks fine then repeat the process, perhaps reducing the increment to 5MHz after a couple of overclocks. If you’ve pushed the card too far then artefacts will begin to appear: strange lines, noise and general video oddities. In this case you should make a note of your last successful clockspeed, return to the default settings and move on to the next slider. When finished, you’ll have the highest successful value for each clock, so try setting all the clocks at the appropriate value. This probably won’t be stable, so wind back the clocks you pushed furthest and try again until you’re artefact-free.

RivaTuner is an excellent video overclocking tool that works with both ATI and Nvidia cards

We tried this on a test PC and managed to increase our GeForce 8800 GTS performance by 14 per cent – nothing spectacular, but not bad for a couple of hours’ work. Be sure to monitor your GPU temperature and increase fan speeds if necessary. RivaTuner has everything you need to safely tweak both ATI and Nvidia video cards.

Find the bottleneck

If everything we’ve discussed so far still doesn’t get you close to the frame rates you need, your system may have a bottleneck that’s holding everything else up.

Is your system RAM up to the task, for instance? When equipped with only 2GB of generic DDR2 DIMMs, our test PC barely reached 20fps on the Crysis demo (1,600 x 1,200, high quality). We replaced these with 4GB of Crucial’s finest Ballistix offerings and frame rates went up by almost 25 per cent – not bad for an £80 to £90 outlay. And that’s just the start – faster and more reliable RAM means you’ll probably be able to overclock your CPU further, too.

A RAM upgrade didn’t offer the same benefits if we tried to run Crysis at the very highest-quality levels, though: the 2GB test returned 11.75fps, the 4GB a near-identical 11.915fps. That’s because the graphics card is now the bottleneck. It simply couldn’t deliver acceptable performance at the settings we’d chosen.

As a last resort, then, you can always change your game settings. There’s usually an intimidating list of quality-related options, but tweaking just one or two of these will often be enough.

In Crysis, for instance, just changing the Shading Quality setting from ‘Very High’ to ‘Medium’ was enough to see our test PC’s 1,600 x 1,200 frame rate leap from 11.915fps to 23.61fps.

Although Crysis will by default use DirectX 10 when installed on Windows Vista and 7, switching to DirectX 9 gave us a further big performance jump to a new frame rate of 35.49fps. There’s no guarantee that other games with a similar option will see such a huge improvement, but it’s worth a try.

We finished by applying some of the techniques we mentioned earlier. Disabling PC resource hogs increased the frame rate by four per cent; turning off pointless services gave us a three per cent increase; using Process Lasso added more than five per cent; and overclocking returned an extra 14 per cent. They’re small gains, but every little really does help, and the incremental effect meant that a previously unplayable game was now purring along at more than 45fps. That’s close to a 400 per cent improvement – a real result.

Let’s begin with a quote. “Apple’s recent amendment to its developer agreement – which forces developers to write applications its way, using its tools – has done three things: isolated Apple even more from the wider technical community; wasted the time and money of companies and people who have invested in building iPhone-compatible developer toolkits (and the developers who have used them); and diverted industry attention to other smartphone technologies.”

This was the response I got from Mark Rodseth, Technical Architect at web design company Fortune Cookie, when I asked him for his take on Apple’s recent announcement that it is banning the development of iPhone OS applications using third-party compilers. The likes of Rodseth – and his clients – are responsible for the majority of apps that currently populate Apple’s App Store. And Mark’s isn’t an isolated opinion. I’ve had similar responses from the majority of developers that I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks.

Apple can’t be naive enough to have thought that this move would go unnoticed, and it clearly expected some kind of backlash, but – by the very fact that it included the new stipulations in the conditions for iPhone OS 4 application development – we have to assume that it was a risk the company was willing to take. I find this a staggering example of Apple’s arrogance, and – in the light of a recent report coming out of the US – I think that the company has made a huge mistake.

The report in question is a Mobile Metrics release from AdMob, one of the world’s largest mobile advertising networks (recently bought by Google). Whenever an ad is served to a mobile device via the AdMob network, the company stores and analyses handset and operator data to optimise ad serving. It also uses this information to highlight major trends, and hidden away in the report for March – well, it wasn’t really that hidden – was a very interesting nugget of information. As well as showing facts such as 54 per cent of Android traffic comes from devices with QWERTY keyboards (one of the ‘standout’ figures pulled out of the report for the press), there was a graph in the body of the AdMob report that should act as a serious warning to Apple.

According to the report, March was the first month in which Android ad traffic overtook iPhone traffic in the US: Android’s American OS share increased to 46 per cent, compared to 39 per cent for iPhone OS. These figures weren’t replicated in markets outside the US though, with the iPhone continuing to bag the top spot globally – it has 46 per cent of overall OS share– and Android OS a fair bit behind, with a quarter of the mobile OS market. But despite iPhone OS still being far and away the global leader, the figures released in this report should act as a bellwether for non-US mobile markets. Where America goes, the rest of the Western world tends to follow.

As we’ve already mentioned, AdMob is a company owned by Google – the leading company in the Open Handset Alliance, and the firm now responsible for the development of the Android mobile operating system. You’d be forgiven for pointing out the obvious here – it does seem somewhat suspicious that the first report produced since Google took over the company points to an advantage for the Google-backed OS for the first time. However, given AdMob’s previous pedigree, and the pains taken to establish the credibility of these figures, we have no reason to question their validity.

So, assuming that these figures based on advertising can – by and large – be extracted to represent overall web traffic from mobile devices, Android is now the top dog in the US. When the new iPhone launches this Summer, we can expect a spike in traffic emanating from iPhone OS-based devices – it’s happened after every major iPhone release so far – but the writing is definitely on the wall for Apple. With Android Market boasting more than 38,000 applications at the time of writing, and the developer community embracing this open platform for mobile development, Apple’s decision to kick developers in the face has never seemed more foolish than it does right now.

“While many developers watch from the sidelines and consider where best to invest their time and creative energy on smartphone platforms, I’ve picked my side already. It’s called Android and everyone’s invited,” Rodseth concludes.

Despite being an open-source stalwart, I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve always had something of a love-hate relationship with Apple. In the ’80s, I owned – and still do own – an original Apple IIe along with a real hard drive and two 5.25in floppy drives. It was inherited from the video shop that I worked in, and I put it and its immense customer database to all kinds of nefarious uses. But eventually I moved on to the upland pastures of colour displays, 880kB of storage on a 3.5in disk and four-channel sound. All thanks to Commodore.

In the ’90s, Apple’s expensive and closed hardware meant that an upgrade was never on the cards. This was now the world of Windows, of cheap hardware and modular upgrades. It was the time when Microsoft solidified its dominance, and the time that many of us were looking for a more open alternative. Developing applications on Windows was expensive, especially if you wanted to share the source code. That left us with only one option: Linux. And I’ve never looked back.

But I’ve continued to follow, and occasionally invest in, the progress of Apple, especially in recent years. The move to Intel and a BSD-based operating system has made OS X eminently more hackable, and Linux-
based open-source applications are far easier to build and port to OS X than they are to Windows. This has helped make the venerable MacBook Pro one of the most common laptops in use at open-source and Linux conventions, despite Apple’s obsessive control of the hardware. Apple, for many, has become an acceptable compromise for those who believe in free software but still want a machine that can resume from hibernation without the need to build a custom kernel.

But it’s the iPhone, and now the iPad, that has built a brick wall of division between what most of us are willing to ignore, and what Apple hopes will become their ultimate cash cow. Both are the result of a singular, draconian vision, the antithesis of what the open-source community represents. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, especially when the results leave a lot of free software products wanting. The interfaces of iPhone apps tend to be refined, simple and intuitive. The apps are consistent, responsive and cheap. Our parents could use an iPad without fear of viruses, malware and updates. For almost all the same reasons I’ve been telling them to switch to Linux, they can now switch to Apple for about the same cost.

But doing so is a pact with the devil, because you’re forgoing technical complexity in exchange for loss of freedom. This is the reason for Richard Stallman’s GNU manifesto. And while there’s little doubt that Apple’s enforced gateway to new applications has helped to make it a success, it’s this subtle trade of simplicity for complicity that is perhaps the biggest threat to free software in 10 years.

My fears were proven when Apple recently changed clauses 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 in its developer’s agreement, stopping programmers linking to third-party APIs. Its motivation may have been to halt apps using Adobe’s new Flash-based building tools, but it could also stop applications using open source-based frameworks such as MonoTouch and SDL. Apple refuses to clarify what will and will not be allowed through its vetting procedure. Presumably Electronic Arts games will still be allowed to use the LUA scripting engine, for example, while many independent developers aren’t going to know whether their approach is acceptable until they submit their app for review.

This type of business plan shows the very worst of what closed-source development has to offer, and exactly what open-source software blossomed to combat. But we can’t fight it with rhetoric and positive spin while our hardware and applications aren’t as good as those from closed systems. Public development and public scrutiny should lead to a better, more usable and more stable product. It worked for Linux servers and desktops, but it hasn’t worked for mobile devices yet. This is the challenge for free software developers.

It’s going to be tough, but this point in time probably marks the biggest opportunity for free software to prove its worth. It’s going to be a simple battle between closed, proprietary development on a single platform, and open innovation on open hardware. Open-source developers need to rise to the challenge or face a future that will be closed to collaboration, community and conscience.